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Miniatures

It’s been a hot summer thus far (yeah, no kidding, it’s Texas for God’s sake).

I have not been motivated to skate very much in the heat. I’d rather not go out and just feel miserable afterward. So I’ve been painting some D&D miniatures. I’m not great at it, but not horrible. One nice thing about being an adult, that’s a change from when I did it as a teenager, is that I an afford the box of paints that has pretty much every color. The paints are nicer now too.

I am playing in a D&D campaign. The monster — I like to just find weird monsters to use as aliens and alien monsters in my Traveller campaign. This is an image of the monster in process. The wizard is finished.

Hawk

As any skateboarder with an internet connection now knows, Tony Hawk broke his femur last week. Really nasty break. He was in Austin a few days later, on crutches, with hardware in his leg, for the first showing of the new documentary about his life in skating at South by Southwest.

This morning on his Hawk vs Wolf video/podcast he and Jason Ellis talk about it.

It is really something to see Hawk talk about this injury. Clearly it was horrible, and he has the look of a man who already understood the effects of aging on his skating, and now understands it even more. But what is really moving is hearing him essentially say that (besides just wanting to walk normally again) he just wants to skate. That desire just to skate, regardless the so-called level of his skating. Obviously if Tony is skating at about 10% his peak, that is about 1000% for everyone else, but the point is the same. All of us just want to skate. It is very humanizing to see this legendary skater really not knowing what the future of his skating looks like, but just wanting to skate.

 

First session of 2022

First session of the year, since the weather turned to crap in November 2021. The first session of the new year is always rough, as it take about 1 or maybe 2 sessions to get my feet back under me. Legs are always a little weaker after winter, and I’m just a bit rusty in general. Was good to be back on my board and I’m looking forward to a good year of skating.

Anyway, I was a little slow today, a little afraid of little rocks, and just generally getting the feel for my board again.

Cyberpunk

The other night I watched this documentary, No Maps for These Territories. It’s an interview with William Gibson, who pretty much invented the Cyberpunk sub-genre of science fiction. There were some other author involved, but after watching this documentary and reflecting on my own readings of Gibson’s Burning Chrome anthology and his Sprawl Trilogy, I realized that in my mind that stuff IS cyberpunk. Gibson’s vision is it.

Anything else I’ve read that had the “cyberpunk” label attached has been at least a little disappointing. I think Gibson’s vision is so rich and so deep that for anyone else to really do what he did, well, they’d just be seen as copying him.

One of the best histories of the genesis of cyberpunk appears in Victoria Blake’s introduction to Cyberpunk: Stories of Hardware, Software, Wetware, Evolution, and Revolution.

The only thing I’ve seen that really visually looks like Cyberpunk is Blade Runner. Gibson has said that he was writing Neuromancer when Blade Runner came out, and he was afraid people would think he simply copied Ridley Scott. Apparently the more recent Netflix series Altered Carbon takes its visual style from Blade Runner. You can’t overemphasize the impact of Blade Runner. Everything else I’ve seen, including the film adaptation of Gibson’s short story Johnny Mnemonic, look like over the top Duran Duran videos.

Not sure where I’m going with this. To sum up. I like the novels of William Gibson, I like Blade Runner, I will check out Altered Carbon.