What does /tg/ think of Biopunk? Is it just a hollow aesthetic like steampunk or can it be more?
Just aestheticsm amnd nothing more.
>>48072161
its really great in underwater, alien or otherwise mythical. disney's Atlantis movie was great in that regard.
>>48072161
That depends on the story being told. Any setting is just wallpaper if some part of it isn't incorporated in the story. Cool setting either way, though.
>>48072161
the dalkyer (sp?) from ebberon had this down. literally had a suit of armor and a whip that were living creatures.
From my experiences Biopunk tends to come in a few different flavors. Post Cyberpunk were flesh and machine are mixed like OP or the Engineers from Prometheus, The Zerg were everything is flesh and looks evolved instead of engineered, and dieselpunk counter culture like in Leviathan.
>>48072344
I absolutely love the aesthetic of evolutionary, or gengineered biopunk. Rows of tubes with widely disparate creatures floating in them, silent monitors displaying every bit of vital information about them. White labcoats and thick gloves. Screens displaying scrolling genome spreadsheets as an AI examines it, looking for places where the creature might die in vitro because of faults in the engineering. The sterile white of tiled floors contrasting the crimson of blood being drawn to double-, triple-, and quadruple-check for genetic faults that might cause the creature to die on contact with the air, or something in it, and the myriad palette of colored chemicals, serums, and tinctures used to distill certain features out of one genome to be added to another.
>>48072161
Like all the punk "genres", 99% of it is hollow aesthetics.
Also, good luck finding a consensus on what exactly is biopunk.
However, biological equipment is cool and can strenghten a narrative if done correctly.
It can provide some interesting reflections: What is the self, how does your body defines who you are, what is a machine, what is the status of animals (especially ones with heightened intelligence), and so on.
The whole range of bioethics questions, really.
It pains me that we don't have a lot of good sci-fi authors interrogating the future currently.
>>48072161
Making vehicles that possess the ability to get diseases seems like a bad idea.
>>48072597
>Software Viruses
I'm pretty sure the Angel Experiment qualifies as bio-punk, the basic plot is that it's 6 artificially created genetic experiments on the run from the megacorp that created them.
Biopunk is more than aesthetics because the premise raises ethical questions about the morality of modifying life, and the repercussions of doing so. By definition it's already as deep as actual steampunk, and infinitely deeper than cog foppery
>>48072811
shame that that takes the backseat to the "fuck you dad" content of the books.
>>48072161
Biopunk is disgusting and vile. Even if it's conditionally more effective or efficient for some reason, I'd still take the solid beauty of metal and marble.
>>48072597
>>48072633
That's actually usually a really good excuse for Biopunk, since humanities immune system is pretty fucking hyperactive compared to most animals.
>>48072866
Huh. I guess sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover.
>>48072201
How's Disney's Atlantis biopunk?
Wait. Is this punking against the bio, or punking with the bio?
>>48072886
> save you some time, it's shit
>>48072922
Wouldn't that be Steam Age ClarkePunk?
>>48072880
Wanna explain further?
>>48072963
He may be referring to allergies, which are basically the Immune system reacting to stuff that they don't need to react to. So kinda hyperactive.
But there may be more to his statement than just allergies.
>>48072161
It's an aesthetic, the strength of the story and setting are what matters. You can love an aesthetic, but if it's not written well it's all just pretty pictures.
Are tyranids biopunk ?
>>48072923
This is how I insert conflict whenever I use biopunk. One side sees it as a new way for The Man to control us, the other sees it as freeing and the Antis are The Man trying to limit us.
>>48072923
Can we punk adjacent to the bio?
>>48073609
No but you can punk at right angles against or towards the bio.
>>48072963
>>48073038
Not that anon, but humans have a pretty good immune system compared to a lot of animals we deal with on a daily basis, because we've selected for other traits (milk/egg production, floppy ears, etc.). We also have a surprisingly broad base of leukocytes that recognize different viruses, because we cannot stop fucking animals and diseases often hop to us and need to be dealt with.
However, in my favourite bit of bioknowledge, alligator immune systems are absolutely fantastic. So if you want to go beyond vaccines, we need to start making Killer Crocs.
>>48072923
Punk is about rebelling against the status quo and The Man, but I don't quite see how that works with gene engineering which needs large infrastructure. I guess planting hemp seeds in public parks is a type of biopunk?
>>48073663
That's because biopunk isn't a thing. It's a unnecessarily specific sub-subgenre cyberpunk
>>48073663
Depending on how far technology got, there's ways to be a biopunk. For instance, a guy working out of his garage making retroviruses that give minor benefits to people until they run their course, or who operates a nutrient bath system that lets people skip the hospital (and all the associated insurance), who will graft a pair of horns to your dog for the awesome look of it or design an agent that makes bees hyperaggressive so he can release that at an outdoor political rally he disagrees with.
You have to assume that biotech has gone the same way as manufacturing and computer tech (everything miniaturized enough and streamlined enough for autists to tinker with on their own, at least in the small scale), but it's not impossible.
>>48073692
Reverse engineering Monsanto corn to prison break it? Smuggling saplings across the border? Could work.
>>48072161
Your question is inherently flawed.
There IS no "something more", and ALL aesthetics are hollow; be definition it's just a pretty thing to look at. Like the Grand Canyon; sure it's amazing and impressive, but really all it is is a big fucking hole in the ground.
Definition, meaning, and "something more" is provided by context and subtext and actual SUBSTANCE beyond a piece of visual imagery you can look at once and absorb all you'll ever need to know about it.
Despite what the idiot pretentions of /tg/ claims, there's nothing inherently wrong with steampunk or ANY kind of punk; there IS something wrong with shitty writers taking a visual aesthetic and then assuming the coolness of the aesthetic will somehow bleed into their shitty writing even though nothing of the sort is true.
There is no "something more" to steampunk or cyberpunk or biopunk or anything else at all because all it is is mostly a visual aesthetic people use for various forms of entertainment, and therefore it's usage and substance depends on the author. Of these ONLY cyberpunk has some extra meaning tacked on (thanks to it's origins in literature), and even what THAT is you'll find a dozen conflicting opinions.
>>48072834
If that's the case, the lines between bio and cyberpunk are really vague. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it means they'd be more of a heavily overlapping Venn diagram than actual clearly defined and discreet genres.
>>48073811
Technically speaking you could do that with all genres at present and almost all the little bubbles wouldn't be more than 2 degrees away from each other and most would be touching a good amount of others.
Honestly I don't think I could ever find a use for this sort of... theme.
It just seems very messy.
>>48073740
>and ALL aesthetics are hollow; be definition it's just a pretty thing to look at. Like the Grand Canyon; sure it's amazing and impressive, but really all it is is a big fucking hole in the ground.
Except when aesthetics are used to express thing beyond appearance, through appearance. And the Grand Canyon is a geological treasure of enormous importance for the field, which of itself is of enormous importance.
>>48072161
I like how Half-Life 2 handled it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBo_rKleNw
SOON
>>48072161
Meh. I like biotech but not the stuff that's just an animal turned into some sort of vehicle or with a bunch of guns strapped to it. It either just looks dumb or just straight up cruel to the point that no one but a tyrannic race of psychopathic aliens could think it was a good idea. Machines that look like animals are neat though.
I like it better when it's more dealing with colonies of single celled stuff that you're influencing to fulfill roles you want it too. Symbiotes and battle parasites and stuff like that. So naturally occurring grey goo with a wider color pallet is what I'm into I suppose.
Currently working on a biopunk sci-fi setting.
How far do you think I should let computers go? I want to have tech be more bio-based than circuit-based (no cybernetics but everyone bioaugments and genemods their body, ships have massive internal brains that handle all the calculations, etc.) but I don't know when to diverge the timelines.
I wouldn't mind people having smart-phone equivalents, I just think that by the time transistors develop to that level it's going doing down an irrevocable path. Maybe have the split at Dolly the Sheep, where everyone decides to fund biotech for... reasons?
>>48074347
Well there's the tech "wall" silicon valley fears. Basically when we just plain can't miniaturize or optimize anymore. The claim is somewhere between 20-60 years from now and failing some MASSIVE breakthrough all we can do beyond that point is making headway in mass production and maintenance. Obviously quantum computers will have an impact but the best estimate is around a century from now for actually effective computing in a normal sized package and thats assuming we make several break throughs in the interim.
Assuming we hit this wall full force biomechanics could be a feasible way around it as brains are surprisingly scary at information storage and the more we look at it the more it seems like a pseudo-form of quantum computing. We're even now looking into crazy shit like how our eyes self lubricate and how that could be used in literally any machine by farming nerves that do the same job in our eyes via sensing dryness and undue friction. We're also looking into animals with cells that produce electricity which in theory could make powerplants that eat organic waste and shove out electricity. Hell we've already achieved algae that produce fuel that unmodified cars can use and all we need is a way to compact it and make it happen a few hundred times faster. The cartilage in our knees function damn near frictionlessly which would revolutionize any machinery that moves.
I guess what I'm saying is the cut off for tech not beatig organic components was about 3 decades ago and as demand and innovation happens we shove in organic bits where and when applicable.
>>48073481
Pic reminded me of this
>>48074574
Or this
>>48074347
Maybe too on the nose, but I could see a Zika virus like pandemic or Children of Men like scenario resulting in a massive rush to invest in biotech for cures/alternate reproductive methods which then evolves into an international or capitalistic arms race for better and more extreme genetic alteration.
>>48073663
>Punk is about rebelling against the status quo and The Man, but I don't quite see how that works with gene engineering which needs large infrastructure.
You need to divorce your mind from the outdated idea that a "-punk" setting requires rebellion against authority. We're all aware that cyberpunk is the genre that started the trend, and that cyberpunk's "thing" was rebelling against the man, but the inherent meaning of the "-punk" suffix has changed over the years to be a simple descriptor rider.
While most people seem to have come to terms with this fact, there will probably be a couple of angry replies to this telling me that "-punk" isn't a placeholder for "prevalent element in this setting".
Pic related; it's the biopunk equivalent of a pink mohawk
>>48074629
Well we're currently opening the door for the last bit as america screwed itself recently on genetics saying its immoral grounds and won't even touch it where shitstain china just said "throw money at us and we'll work on it" so people fucking did and now we're waiting to see if they actually can make supersoldiers and if they'll survive the publicity of the corpses of failures.
>>48073733
>there's ways to be a biopunk
You mean like that one guy who reverse engineered his friends' poo and did kooky stuff with stomach bacteria to unfuck his digestive system by making pills out of that gunk?
tl;dr experimental probiotics
I'm surprised these haven't been posted yet, as this is objectively the best biopunk setting.
>>48072161
Not much of an aesthetic. It's more of a specific view of the future, and it's hard to really say much for it because it's not limited per se.
>Can it be more?
Sure. If you're interested in the question of Humanity proper, biological alteration is less established and more viscerally grotesque than bionics for the purposes of making people actually think about the question. And it results in a different set of near-future situations than more established things do. To me, it seems like the value in it is in the Giger look of it-- It's uncomfortable in a way that's artful. But if you intend to do the same with just written descriptions, you'll need to be a lot more clever with how you bend people's comfort zones.
>>48073752
>a dozen conflicting opinions
You may be underselling that a bit. Has anybody here seen two people agree on what the meaning of Cyberpunk is?
>>48074645
The entirety of "punk" is the rejection of polite society and authority.
What you are describing is "dress up".
>>48074662
"We forgot solar panels exist: The novel"
>>48074740
"Dress up" describes most of what gets the -punk suffix. What happened to cyberpunk is that it became common enough, and obtained a genre following on its own to an extent that you could identify the visual markers of it more quickly than you could identify the genre elements underneath that-- Which led to works that bit on the visual elements (for valid or invalid reasons) without really worrying about other defining elements of the literature. Then The Difference Engine sparked Steampunk, which was named because the kind of worldbuilding and description that had become fairly known as an indicator of cyberpunk was shifted onto this newer fad genre, and the 'steampunk' name was chosen to describe that, and then every other -punk anything tagged on from that convention.
Just the words that comprise the names of these genres can't really be a criterion, since the words have been used half-assed and inconsistently from everybody between content creators, publishers, fans, short-lived countercultures, and so on. It just misses too much context to be sufficient.
>>48074745
B-b-but these springs are more efficient! And we need that land for food not solar panels!
>>48074662
I read The Water Knife by this guy, it was fairly compelling. Felt like it lost momentum as time went on, and the ending really failed to live up to the tone it'd cast up to that point. But that didn't ruin the whole thing for me.
>>48074537
Thanks. I don't know if that's where I'll make the break (I've already rewritten the setting a couple of times as the rules change) but that stuff like eyeball lubrication and cartilage is definitely making it in there.
>>48074629
An arms race is going to be part of it, but I personally don't like the "pandemic" explanation - it always feels kinda lazy to me, like the writer said, "I don't know how to get from point A to point B, so I'm just going to throw everything up in the air and only catch what I want to keep."
>>48073609
>>48073647
I'd punk her bio, if ya knowhaddimean.
>>48072886
From reading them when I was twelve, from what I can remember, The first three were pretty good, if a bit edgy OTT in retrospect. But even when I was twelve I knew full well it should have ended at book three, instead they kept going, with the kids going to Antarctica to save the penguins, and sitting around doing pointless relationship drama.
Decent concept, terrible execution.
>>48074886
Regarding the arms race bit, I can see where that other anon is coming from. Suppose Zika becomes an even more massive problem than it is, and then suppose that some bright labcoat somewhere gets the idea to use modified CRISPR technology to engineer unique leukocytes specifically to target/entrap Zika.
If we play off the idea that the world had to funnel ludicrous amounts of funds into the technology and infrastructure to make these advancements, you've basically set the stage for a biotechnology revolution, so long as someone in-setting has the foresight to repurpose the infrastructure for generic experimentation and production.
>>48074273
oh boy this changed a lot since the last video I saw
Watch this nagas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVa_IZVzUoc
>ctrl-f Twig
>no results
/tg/ i am disappoint. i'm betting the baron was using those children's brains for some kind of biotech computer - given that mental augmentations are mostly absent in setting so far for everybody but lambs like sy and jamie or top-tier nobles like the Duke or Infanta and wildbow's Boil snip had a back-alley thinking machine.
>>48072937
no, more along the lines of the atlantians tech. They had flying fish that were pretty cool.
>>48076002
Those were stone powered by magitech, not organic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8kf5HNIgwg
>>48072161
>Is it just a hollow aesthetic like steampunk or can it be more?
Anything with the -punk suffix is just hollow aesthetic.
>>48075704
>>48073144
Tyranids and H.R. Giger are what I think of when I think of biopunk. Everything is organic, grown and evolved. No metals, no electricity, all blood and flesh and carapace. Flesh sculpted and moulded as it grows to form structures of all sorts and kinds. Omnipresent genitalia is optional.
Biopunk is great for aliens, for humans it seems a little too, well, alien.
>>48076975
Honestly, to do full-on biopunk right 'human' needs to be an arbitrary distinction. You can tinge things with modifications and get on the road of strange, but it's not pure biopunk, imo.
>>48074745
Or, you know, nuclear power.
I still enjoyed the resource-scarcity aesthetics.
Yeah, this was a thing in the late 90s a la Lexx, Farscape bunch of other stuff. Also like 1/4 of all anime. Not exactly original. I don't think it's a very original aesthetic. Has no sense of time.
I think it can be something more.
Oh great, another phrase with -punk at the end. Are people dressing up as fucking dolphins with goggles yet?
>>48076975
Why not both? China Mievelle's Bas-Lag novels have "punishment factories", where instead of locking criminals up they will alter them, adding limbs or taking away parts to make them rejects of society (for example: a whistleblower for government corruption had his mouth removed) - while others are combined with machines for the purpose of slave labor.
>>48077132
>hating anything -punk
Faggot. I bet you hate Stonepunk, too.
>>48077129
So Magic cards are biopunk now?
>>48077140
Yeah, none of that is new.
>>48077166
Say what you want, at least steampunk and cyberpunk had an aesthetic, the former from Jules Verne revivalists and an alternate future in the present, the latter from Gibson et al . All this other stuff is marketing crap.
>>48077209
Phyrexia has always been a biopunk setting.
>>48077166
Don't give the publishing houses any ideas. They'll probably give you a 3 book deal if you tell them about your exciting stonepunk series, which is in no way related to the Flintstones.
Dinotopia actually did this, more or less. It actually was pretty good.
>>48075382
CRISPER/Cas9 is going to be the tool that shapes the biotech revolution
>>48077310
>punk
>A collective of bio-mechanical horrors looking to assimilate all planes into their collective
the term punk is cancer.
>>48077440
Phyrexia is the "big corp" that hogs all knowledge of Bioengineering and thrives upon it, and those that rebel against the assimilation are the punks.
A bit far fetched but whatevs
>>48074537
The bit that makes our joints nearly friction-less is the synovial fluid and how it interacts with healthy bone/cartilage. I'd give you more detail, but it's been a couple years since my last tissue engineering class (I have my degree in Biomedical Engineering).
It is amazing, but, it's also hard to achieve synthetically. Your best bet is to either have a sealed compartment with hardened graphene walls operating at a near vacuum. OR, Some sort of sealed compartment filled with an inert noble gas like Argon. At a certain point, smoothness of surfaces and fluidity of interstitial material stops being effective and you have to worry about limitations of the molecular structure of the involved components. Synovial fluid is great, but it's mostly water and won't interact the same way in a different setting.
>>48077493
yeah crazy, except thats pretty much how patents work
>>48077050
I forgot they made the black chick a monkey.
>>48074537
Chemical computers and wetware/neurcomputers already exist. Google is your friend.
>>48077508
Have you studied ALife (Artifical Life) at all?
>>48077079
A bunch of hippie fgts devoted their lives to misunderstanding how energy works and making it nearly fucking impossible to build a nuke plant. Virtually all our power comes from coal.
>>48077759
Yeah, not that guy. But I stumbled upon this video not too long ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcHcNyC6O84
Pretty interesting stuff coming up in the next 20-ish years I hope.
>>48077132
>waaah the meanings of words change over time waaaaah
This is you.
>>48077789
The few nuclear plants in the world still provide for about 10% of the world's energy
They're also by far the biggest power source in France
>>48075382
>modified CRISPR technology to engineer unique leukocytes specifically to target/entrap Zika
Nah, the original plan for now is to erradicate Aedes aegypti for good using bioengineered samples of the same species.
http://www.who.int/emergencies/zika-virus/articles/mosquito-control/en
>>48077771
Nope. Sorry friend, mostly just medical devices, tissue engineering, prosthesis, genetic/epigenetic research, etc. Most programs have to due with stuff that will be profitable/usable within the next 25 years (as that's how long a medical patent can last). Even the simple stuff (like what I just mentioned) is insanely hard to nail down and operate consistently. Investors won't give you money unless you can guarantee return and that can only result from something that is fairly provable and can pass the insane regulatory environment in the U.S. (that's actually why things cost so much)
TL;DR: Nah, you can't make money off of that and won't be able to within the near future. I'll leave that stuff to DARPA.
>>48077835
tl; dr Your guy is an idiot and doesn't understand basic math.
I don't think you actually understand what this is. This is operating like GPGPU parallelization. It may use less electricity, I'd have to review it carefully, which I have no intention of doing, but I see no indication it's any faster. It may actually be slower. The author of the paper doesn't actually seem to understand Big O notation. It doesn't dodge super-polynomial time required to solve NP complete subset problems either, that's just bullshit.
Read the journal article next time, this is not really anything of note. Extensive parallelization is not used very often for reasons I won't get into in any detail. Short version is it's very hard to program for and GPU cores aren't as complex as CPU cores.
If you want further details, someone did apparently refute the thing, presumably for the same reasons I listed, but probably more politely.
>>48078131
Well, of course it's slower than current GPUs that had decades to develop. I just thought it shows more a proof of concept that computing with biological components may be viable some day.
I'm note taking what he says that seriously, but the fact that it works excites me to see where that, or similair tech may lead.
But that the author can't into Big-O notation is quite embarrassing.
>>48077933
Thanks for the reply. Know any good books or industry magazines on the business end of any of that? Language and price are irrelevant. I read most of the Western ones.
re: Alife, figured I'd ask. No one is really into it. And the people who are don't seem to know what anyone else in the field is doing. You know anything good along the lines of Ilya Prigogine written in coherent English? That part's for pleasure not business. I just have no idea what he's saying.
Cheers.
>>48078272
So many punks.
>>48078210
Computing with biological components is viable, they've done some of it (see neurocomputing and chemical computing). Just probably not the way this guy is doing it. Just because the guy likes his picture on TV doesn't mean he knows what he's doing.
There's a lot of cool legit research happening now that's really revolutionary in genetics, bioinformatics, C-Path, etc. The problem is a lot of it is difficult to explain.
In C-Path, edge detection and segmentation problems aren't all that sexy even if the underlying concept (detecting cancer better) is readily intelligible. Beck and some other people have good papers on that. Beck's a pretty good writer, too. Not very math-y since a lot of the audience is doctors, not just computer people.
>>48078310
Are you a _____-Punk? Did you have a _____-punk experience?
>"I was walking downtown when it was foggy and saw some shitty neon lights and took a picture of it with my ipad, it felt pretty cyberpunk to me!"
Great!
>"I took apart a grandfather clock and glued the cogs to my hat!"
Awesome!
>"I stuck a nail in a cyst, that's bio punk right?"
....You need to get that checked out before it gets infect!
>>48078243
I actually don't really know of too many books/magazines on the subjects. I get most of my info directly from NIH papers or research papers off of PubMed. Those are great for any info on upcoming technologies.
Unfortunately, there isn't always a lot of open source info on the business side of things unless there is controversy. Businesses will try to keep any advantage they can on IP without getting a patent or copyright because then it's public knowledge and the government will only protect you for so long.
Other than that, I actually get my info straight from the source by talking to my peers that work for different companies. I've mostly worked in research and I'm shifting to the business side and getting my MBA. Your best bet is to read about the technology in an NIH paper and then research the source material for said paper. You should eventually find something similar to what you are looking for.
Sorry if I'm not a lot of help. Good Luck with your search!!
>>48078362
Is there an Oldpunk?
Get Off My Lawnpunk?
>>48078411
>Get Off My Lawnpunk?
Texas?
>>48078401
Which journals? I'm aware of the patent situation. I'm not opening a medical devices shop up the block from you, but one of my company's primary market demos is virtually the same as medical devices e.g. old people, frequently low-SES so I'm always on the lookout for case studies of similar businesses. This segment is more or less the least desired one in general. I already read my industry trades.
>>48078411
SenilityPUNK
>>48078272
You're missing Kidpunk, Cavepunk, and Magipunk.
>>48078411
OAPunk
>>48078579
geriatricpunck
>>48074645
>>48074740
>>48073663
I always thought that punk was generally just a way to emphasize the inevitable ugly side of a given situation. Whether this means rebellion against it or using elements of it to fight against other elements of it - all with the same underlying message - is irrelevant.
Also, in any completely punk setting it is possible for individuals to gather enough power and technology of any kind to effectively fight against whatever they are fighting, so biopunk does not necessarily mean a huge infrastructure.
Another thing to consider, is that steampunk and cyberpunk both have fighting against the man while the technologies used would not be possible without a well organized large scale society. So the rebellion is not necessarily against all forms of infrastructure, but against the current social system, or even just the current ruling class of the social system.
>>48078557
Oh no, you're good. Most of the stuff I've worked on is open sourced because I've worked for non-profits and public universities. I honestly just key word search what I'm looking for in the NIH and PubMed directories and find what I'm looking for.
Most AI research that I've heard of is run by EEs and CS guys that work for DARPA on long range recon drones. For your purposes you might want to look into deep brain stimulation. But, I hardly doubt that there are any case studies out there on a business built around this stuff.
If I were in your shoes, I'd try to find a business with a development pattern that might fit the one you're imagining and build it off of that. If you can't find an expert on the subject, become the expert. Good luck!
>>48078629
BariatricSurgeryPunk
>xpunk meme
>>48078727
umadbro?
>>48078699
Thanks. You should read Putt's Law. It will help you advance in your career even further. Plus it's funny. Cheers.
>>48078785
Thanks, will do!! Have a good one!!
>>48077279
Oh please like HR Geiger didn't have aesthetics.
>>48078804
Your mother had aesthetics.
>>48078823
>>48074273
Holy shit, that was a pretty neat concept.
>>48078411
In the far future humanity has suffered a massive fertility problem and children stopped being born.
Just on the the brink of destruction, the very eve of doomsday, they discovered immortality. It wasn't perfect.
Now all thats left of humanity is a few billion people stuck in various stages of decrepitee, forever. All functions had long ago been given over to machines as the working populace waned. The world for the most part kept moving though no one of caliber or ability was left to innovate. Due to the lack of population massive land grabs for personal usage exploded and most people were now safely "retired" on several hundred acres out of sight of others in private, machine maintained solitude.
Until, a new breed of human was created. A rogue scientist shunned by his colleagues centuries ago for being so crazy he'd probably gone senile rose to prominence almost over night, in their warped new view of time, bolstered by his creations: Youths.
A whole new population of humanity using the previously forgotten library of the human genome in its entirety, one of the many desperate attempts to preserve humanities memory, to clone a new batch of humans. These new Humans grow at an abnormal rate and stop for eternity at their designated perfect age for all functions.
But now the new issue looms, space. Space is now at a premium as all good land was long ago bought up. Now wars rage on all borders of the homes and lawns of the Older Class who refuse to admit their time has finally come.
>>48078834
umadbro?
>>48073144
>>48076975
The Yuuzhan Vong in Star Wars are also an example of a race like that.
I'd argue steampunk could be so much more too if executed right.
It's just that its popularity combined with the amount of thought required to make it work makes for lazy/dumb designs flooding the genre.
>>48074273
That told me fuck all what it was about.
>>48078911
Argue all you want, it won't make it true. There has been one passable and thus great, by standards, example of steampunk.
>>48078939
It's basically a horror exploration game. Each area is unique and has puzzles you must figure out. All set to the tune of horror biopunk, right down to the player.
>>48072161
That looks like a digimon.
>>48077904
While I won't miss the little shits, intentional extinction always makes me leery.
>>48079065
Indeed.
biopunk does not expand clown.
>>48073960
I hate the horrible sounds they make
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KUaeyXP3Tw
>>48074273
This has got me rock fucking solid.
>>48078858
awesome
>>48074273
Greenlit, followed, favorited, holy fuck take my money and gimme!
>>48074273
Is that that Serbian made game? Looks nice, i just hope they will do something with that clunky moving.
Biological based mods as shocking and unsettling, deconstructing social mores and highlighting arbitrary distinctions of what constitutes life requires there to be contrast. Biopunk only works as part of a setting, rather than the whole, otherwise it becomes normative, in which case its sure as fuck not punk. Its punk when it has kids, gets married, gets a straight job, gets divorced, losses the kids, keeps the job.
OP's pick works because its a whale, usually cute, nature hippy nice shit that's been torn open, re-purposed. Its Jones inspired, but that's okay.
>Cetaceans have long been used by military outfits, trained for marine mine clearance, reconnaissance, and even attack roles. However their willful, individualistic personalities caused severe problems. Escapees were common, which represented an extremely expensive loss in both resources and time, for their trainers. The J8 program solved this issue with heavily genetically modified Belugas featuring post-growth expansive mechanical grafting which fitted them to be overseen by a human pilot.
From the Leviathan series by Scott Westerfield. The books are written for middle schoolers, and the writing is limited by that level, but the illustrations are great. They're worth peeking into at your local library for the illustrations.
This is a whale/zeppelin, which attacks watercraft by releasing bats that poop flechettes.
Some of his other drawings are on his Deviantart: http://keithwormwood.deviantart.com/gallery/
>>48079176
>Biopunk clowns
>>48073663
This.
Cramming 19th century politics/economics into ultra tech sci fi was cool the first few times they did it. But nearly four decades later, it's gotten impossibly passe, regardless of how cool the superpowers and how hot the girls are.
>>48079633
I'm sorry what? I know Westerfield is good at world building, but honestly what the actual fuck?
>>48079633
Seems comfy, would buy a trip for it.
>>48074347
I'd stick in some sort of apocalypse in the middling future which allowed biotech to become prevalent, as it could self-replicate without needing the massive industrial infrastructure which no longer exists. Just soil, water, and light.
Or you could invoke NANOMACHINES and have machines which heal, grow, and replicate like living organisms. Bio/cyber doesn't have to be a binary.
>>48072161
What is the combine for 200.
>if you put a word before "punk" you got a new type of setting
I want to go back in the eighties
>>48080690
>nostalgiapunk
>>48079222
Their sweet cooing is beautiful, and you need to be recycled.
>>48080690
>wanting to go back to the worst decade of last century
>>48073960
HL2 synths are some of the most memorable enemies in vidya, though I hate the direction they took with the hunters in the episodes.
>>48080936
>Worst decade
>hippie freelove had a small second coming
>drugs everywhere and no real chance for the good shit to be spiked, cut, or poisoned
>rave scene was alive and well and didn't suffer the shit DJ's like it does now
>STI prevalence was still 30% instead of 50%
>music was okay rather than the shit it was now
>shit like modern day "feminism" and "rape culture" hardly existed back then and didn't affect life
>shit on TV was actually worth watching still
>kids joining the work force weren't entirely retarded and could be trusted with things rather than the social retards we produce now
>>48081979
really glad you're going to die before me
>>48072161
Thats just cyberpunk, though.
Biopunk is biological constructs in place of mechanical. Like a suit of armor that is a living thing. It really goes hand-in-hand with body horror. Look at Scorn(videogame) for an example.
>>48072161
I'll just mention my favorite RPG setting is Splicers biopunk vs "The Machines" ala Terminator.
Do these count?
>>48082420
Yes senpai
Ever since finding this guys art this is how I "biopunk"
The jet is actually a living creature being piloted and the wings can fold and move like regular wings.
>>48078858
This is pretty good.
In a completely different direction, this is what I thought of when I heard "geriatricpunk".
It gets a little magical realm in some parts, but it's a fun read anyway.
>>48081979
Faggot, the 80's was part of the decline. The golden era was the 50's.
>>48083161
I never said it was the best, it just wasn't the worst. Everything post 05' so far has been absolute shit and can't hold a candle to the 80's let along the 70's.
>>48077508
Be honest, was your career path inspired by an interest in near-future scifi, or was it just the random/natural evolution of study through school like some people have?
I'm thinking of going back to school for biochem/bioengi, since it's the STEM field that most appeals to me, mainly because of speculative fiction and the progress that's been made in prosthetics, genetic engineering and pharmacology in the last 30-40 years.
>>48082366
Fuckin Splicers man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQKkCMDaN54
>>48084616
>modem
That looks more like an old air conditioner.
>>48073650
To expand on that, having viruses means that you would want people to have the best protection against them, and to personalize equipment have them keyed in to give allergic reactions to non-authorized users while synching up and being protected, or protecting, the users immune system.
Double down for the human brain protecting against software viruses while the equipment protects against biological ones. But that's not really bio-punk or cyberpunk anymore but some fusion.
>>48076658
Look up "Twig" by Wildbow, if you're still here, anon. It's a good read. Worm, also by him, is pretty good as well and generally receives decent recognition on /co/ and /tg/ I've noticed- usually there'll at least be an anon or two in a thread who's read it.
>>48084616
>>48086011
This is some videodrome lookin shit. I can dig
WHERE ALL THE HR. GIGER SHIT AT ?
>>48086049
I'm currently still reading it, and I'm on Interlude 25. S'good reading if you've got enough time to read the equivalent of, like, thirty-five novels to burn through.
What was that movie where the guy assembles a pistol out of gross food scraps?
>>48086511
Existenze, a trippy movie about VR gaming. Inside the game itself there is a few biopunk kind of things.
>>48072597
And yet we did it anyway: >>48072633
>>48078272
SolarPunk!
It's utopian, positive, and vibrant!
>>48088011
In which we all aspire to obtain gross incandescence?
>>48088060
We already have a source of gross incandescence . SP is about remembering that.
![jakten-pa-nyresteinen[1].jpg](https://i.imgur.com/iC58Jgd.jpg "jakten-pa-nyresteinen[1].jpg")
Weirdly, of all the things to attempt this aesthetic, my favourite is probably the 90s norwegian children's movie Jakten på Nyresteinen (Chasing the Kidney Stone/Body Troopers). It's about a kid and his grandfather on vacation at a cabin on an island out in the middle of nowhere when the grandfather suddenly develops a kidney stone, and through circumstances too weird to describe here the kid is shrunk down and goes into his body to try to fix the problem.
It's a weird, weird film, with a strange plot and occationally awkward dialogue (the main characters are kids played by kid actors, after all), but fuck me if the costume and scenery design wasn't fantastic. I have no idea how this thing got made.
>>48084598
So this thing literally shits bullets.
>>48078965
Which one is that? Clockwork Century?
>>48086668
Related.
>>48090399
That movie was weird in all the best ways.
>>48090399
Spoilers for the movie: What they're doing here is installing a new player character for their bodies, it's kind of like downloading info in the Matrix but comes with some weird bits carried over from the source material i.e. there sudden lust in this scene and the guys' compulsion to build the gun in the previous one.
At least that's how I think it went.
For Biopunk, do you have to alter existing beings? What if you just make new species wholesale to do certain tasks (like critters that go around cleaning stuff) but still use regular computers?
Pic unrelated.
I've been working on a setting that I guess would fall under the genre of "biopunk" for some years now.
>>48090399
What movie is that?
>>48091678
Are those your drawings? I dig it.
>>48092218
Yeah, they are mine.
The basic gist of the setting is a gigantic organic city, that has basically fallen into a state of decay and increasing anarchy, over countless generations.
The last vestiges of civilization are ruled by various noble houses, powerful organizations who still possess technological knowledge, and understanding of the city itself, that the rest of the denizens of the city have long since forgotten. The inhabitants of the city are mutant freaks, who come in all shapes and sizes, and range from barely functional broken edifices of flesh, bone and sinew, to dangerously twisted beings of teeth and claw, and everything in between.
>>48092218
I'll take "what is Existenz" for $200 please
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz
>>48092300
>>48092323
Thanks
>>48092312
That sounds cool. Do you post in the Homebrew general or something?
>>48092312
Wasn't there a Giger-world setting discussed on /tg/ a few years back that was like that?
>>48092550
If I'm not mistaken, I believe the anon you're talking to was one of the artists for it.
>>48091678
>>48092312
Good to see you're still kicking, artanon.
>>48092427
Occasionally.
>>48092550
Yeah, I took part in that thread, and have been working on that idea ever since, though at a rather slow pace.
>>48092649
Thanks m8.
>>48074886
that pelvis, tho
>>48072161
Biopunk has always been a part of cyberpunk. Most of the cybernetics in Gibson's stories were biological in nature rather than cold metal, not to mention all the augmented animals (Slamhounds, dolphin hackers, ect). The chrome aesthetic came more from movies and metal album covers, so if anything, that's the real hollow aesthetic.
Has anybody here read anything by Bruce Sterling, particularly his Shaper/Machinist setting? It's a cyberpunk future where humanity is divided between a faction of posthumans who use genetic engineering to make themselves better, and a faction of posthumans who use robots and cybernetics.They both get BTFOed by a faction that doesn't give a fuck about arbitrary dichotomies and uses whatever works best for a given situation.
>>48085829
My family had a US robotics modem back in the 90s. It was like that only black.
>>48086668
>Existenz
thanks for the suggestion, just finished it. Was interesting for sure. I remember seeing the trailer back then and forgot about it.
>>48079453
Trailers are from a pre-alpha build, it should get better when the game actually comes out.
>>48091678
>>48092312
>>48093391
F-freak Quest?
>>48077440
They're the villains though. So rebelling against them would be pretty punk.
>>48097003
Yes?
>>48097003
Someone should do it.
>>48091573
>that filename
Dick move, anon. Dick move.
>>48097378
>Someone should do it.
well volunteered!
No biopunk discussion is complete without mentioning this masterpiece. The author tackles the issues discussed here both in the stories he wrote and in the foreword. Highly recommended.
>>48097734
>Why Ribo? Cybernetics was a dead science when cyberpunk SF was born, a cul-de-sac without living practitioners. Furthermore, the "cyber" prefix has been irreparably debased by overuse, in vehicles ranging from comic books to bad movies. The tag now stands for nothing in the public mind but computer hacking and fanciful cyborgs such as Robocop. And Weiner's actual texts do not provide enough fruitful metaphors for constructing a systematic worldview. Why Funk? Punk was a dead music when cyberpunk SF was born, a cul-de-sac albeit with living practitioners who just hadn't gotten the message yet. The music's nihilistic, chiliastic worldview had already culminated in its only possible end: self-extinction. What is Ribofunk then? Ribofunk is speculative fiction which acknowledges, is informed by and illustrates the tenet that the next revolution--the only one that really matters--will be in the field of biology. To paraphrase Pope, ribofunk holds that: "The proper study of mankind is life." Forget physics and chemistry; they are only tools to probe living matter. Computers? Merely simulators and modelers for life. The cell is King!
The book itself may be good, but God does the author sound full of himself.
>>48084304
Neither haha. My dad wanted me to be a doctor, so chose BME+PreMed to get him off my back. About halfway through I dropped PreMed to start my MBA while finishing up the BME degree.
If you go back for an engineering degree, go into electrical,mechanical or chemical. That's where the jobs are at. If you want a BME degree and still want to work on the really cool stuff (and make a decent living), get a graduate degree (Masters or PhD). But those can get pretty specific and you will get pigeonholed into a particular area of R&D. So choose wisely.
I enjoy biopunk for its innate link to bodyhorror. Its only a hop and a skip from growing yourself some armor to turning a guy you don't like into an alarm system.
>>48072344
>>48079633
The thing that bugged me about Leviathan is they're using a big, slow, floating whale to fight against Germans with literal mechs and walking uboats. I mean they have the technology to build a mortar that could blow the shit out of London or Paris from the safety of Belgium.
Other than at sea when your crazy kraken shit could really come in handy, the war should be over by Christmas.
>>48072161
what is biopunk? fetish for technology with living flesh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvBo_rKleNw
>>48098580
I always figured the Leviathan was meant to just be used as a Command Center rather than a machine of war. While the whale zeppelin has the means to defend itself, the Darwinists have their larger animals like the tiger things and two-story Rusky bear weapon platforms to do the real dirty work.
I would have liked to have seen some ground combat in that settle to really show HOW the Darwinists were holding their own against the Clankers.Fuck, what I really want is an RTS from the Leviathan setting
>>48098002
He's really not. That entire manifesto is sort of tongue-in-cheek. The book doesn't take itself too seriously either. I enjoy in much the same way I enjoy Franken Fran.
He does mention President Trump, as Trump Tower figures heavily into one of the stories.
