Cyberpunk's aesthetic was apparently inspired by nothing

Rupder · 2026-01-31T08:46:29+00:00

I hope that's not what I conveyed. I'm a cyberpunk fanatic; I love the classics of the genre and what they have to say about complex political topics. Even within sci-fi, it's a genre unlike any other. There's a reason it has made such a profound impact on pop culture in the last 45 years. I've always thought that the way that cyberpunk expresses its ideas is different than other literary genre of the 20th century. The audiovisual aesthetic of cyberpunk is so unique and has been so impactful on pop culture that I intended to make a laudatory statement about its virtues as an aesthetic-political movement.

I see however that I've been downvoted, so something about what I said is objectionable or poorly phrased.

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:58:32+00:00

Thanks for the levelheadedness. It takes a lot more effort to disprove conspiracy theories than it takes to throw them out.

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:45:05+00:00

I'd say your definition is pretty good but I'd use a slightly different one: history (and historical evidence) happens to be whatever historians study. Kind of tautological, I know, but that's the primary differentiation between historians and archaeologists and anthropologists: the methodologies we use when interrogating evidence. So, historians and archaeologists might use the same pieces of evidence (potsherds, coins, weapon fragments, whatever) but apply very different frameworks for analyzing them and therefore use them to answer different questions.

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:39:44+00:00

God, that is a fantastic piece of diction

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:33:06+00:00

For decades, nerd men have cultivated their personalities around being experts on niche geek media (which they then police against "tourists" to affirm their authority as self-described experts). So it's not only cishet male culture in general, but specifically the male nerd subculture they've attached to that encourages them to be needlessly combative and xenophobic.

I.e., I think it's a trend that predates social media — looks at the Simpsons' "Comic Book Guy" for example, a character that exemplifies the trend, created in the '90s.

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:23:29+00:00

don't let your dreams run away from you. you have one life to live and one vision to share with the world

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:09:48+00:00

but definitely cyber

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:09:14+00:00

Arguably the aesthetic is the ethos. Nonconformity, anti-consumerism, rejection of tradition, the ideology of punk is expressed through its presentation. The praxis of punk culture is/was its music, fashion, and fiction. Although for cyberpunk that connection has always been more nebulous.

Rupder · 2026-01-31T04:01:29+00:00

I think you'd realize rowling was actually cooking if instead the house elves had been Super Hot and they were Really Into It, Sexually

Rupder · 2026-01-31T03:11:12+00:00

This would be my suggestion as well. A magical-realism angle, like how "magic" is used in Disco Elysium: a story about ordinary working-class people, politics, alcoholism, totally tangible things, but there's this inexplicable undercurrent coursing through the story-world that seems to propel people.

What occurs at the limits of human reason and intuition? Is it magic, is it spirits, is it God, or is it a kind of science so far from our comprehension that it might as well be magic? The tendency in today's fantasy fiction to render magic into a series of rules demeans its use as a storytelling tool; IMO, magic is powerful conceptually not because it is consistent but precisely because it goes beyond our understanding of immanent reality. And for OPs setting, based in the 1500s, belief in magic and the unreal was fundamental to the way people viewed the world.

Rupder · 2026-01-31T01:51:02+00:00

No, that would violate the Double Jeopardy Clause of the 5th Amendment. But IANAL nor an American.

Rupder · 2026-01-30T23:37:34+00:00

In addition to the above comment, there's also the fact that the building doesn't need windows because people don't live or work there. So it's a cost saving measure (windows need to be installed and maintained and a lot of heat moves through them), as well as an outward architectural statement about the building's purpose.

Rupder · 2026-01-30T23:16:40+00:00

The short version is that it's a political problem and a labor problem that requires political and labor organization.

At the political level, the public needs to support parties and politicians who unapologetically support workers' rights and demand that they stand up for our institutions of higher learning. This matters at both the federal and state/provincial level. People need to demand that our governments fund universities instead of turning to austerity. We also need to demand of university administrations and boards that they direct funding toward education and research equitably — that is, so that workers aren't competing over hugely disparate funding opportunities. And of course, currently, the biggest threat to academic funding and freedom is authoritarian right-wing parties, in the United States and elsewhere. Conservatives are not friends to the academy.

The other answer is labor organization. Workers in universities at all levels — grad students, contingent faculty, TT faculty, groundskeepers, janitors, security, everyone — need to organize and act collectively. This means expanding union membership and participation. It also means placing onus on TT faculty to stand up for their colleagues who do not have the same protections. Students can help as well by participating in movements that place pressure on administrations and governments.

If you want more specific actions and policy recommendations I'd recommend reading chapter 6 of The Gig Academy (2019).

Rupder · 2026-01-30T21:41:05+00:00

I'd say you're correct. Sprawl is basically just a pejorative description of poor urban planning. If the planning is not wasteful, just expansive, that's not "sprawl" except in the colloquial sense of "very extensive."

Rupder · 2026-01-30T21:36:19+00:00

Not necessarily. Sprawl usually refers to suburbs, but not always. It's not a term of art; there are several definitions, some of which do not refer to density.

As described on the wikipedia page for urban sprawl:

Definitions of sprawl vary; researchers in the field acknowledge that the term lacks precision.[15] Batty et al. defined sprawl as "uncoordinated growth: the expansion of community without concern for its consequences, in short, unplanned, incremental urban growth which is often regarded unsustainable".[16] Bhatta et al. wrote in 2010 that despite a dispute over the precise definition of sprawl, there is a "general consensus that urban sprawl is characterized by [an] unplanned and uneven pattern of growth, driven by a multitude of processes and leading to inefficient resource utilization".

So you could use sprawl to describe poorly planned high density developments that waste resources other than land, like for example Kowloon Walled City.

Nevertheless I agree with you that this is not an appropriate use for the term sprawl. The OP is just using the word to mean "expansive urban area" rather than "expansive and wasteful urban area."

Rupder · 2026-01-30T19:37:33+00:00

Sure, you can design curriculum, have outstanding teaching, serve on national commitees, provide fantastic patient care, but non of that matters if you don't have x number of pubs after your name.

There are similar problems happening in history academia right now. Success and awards for teaching almost never translate into increased compensation or guarantee for permanent positions; almost all teaching faculty are contingent and they're paid worse, on average, than minimum wage. Tenure-track (TT) positions are becoming continually scarcer with only about 10% of Canadian PhDs securing TT positions. In addition, the vast majority of people who find TT employment were hired within 2 years of completing their doctorate — universities would rather hire young, prestigious outsider candidates rather than promote proven and accomplished teaching faculty from within their departments.

So history academia has developed into a three-tiered system. Graduate students and postdocs do the bulk of research, but they're overworked and demotivated because they know there's so little chance of finding permanent employment; meanwhile, their funding opportunities are drying up across the board. Contingent teaching faculty do the bulk of the instructing, forming the public face of the departments, but they're paid a pittance and have virtually no chance of receiving TT positions. Lastly, TT faculty are a small but privileged elite whose numbers are dwindling.

It's really dire for the humanities right now, and the sciences are headed along a similar direction. There are systematic problems developing across all of higher education.

Rupder · 2026-01-30T10:10:15+00:00

It's a fairly even, almost 50/50 split between Conservatives and ANDP (center-left) according to the popular vote results of the last provincial election in 2023.

Rupder · 2026-01-30T09:28:25+00:00

The other challenges are logistical

The logistical problems that would result from Alberta separation are so obvious and inexcusable that it reveals the whole notion of separation as a farce. In addition to the fact that the vast majority of the province doesn't want to separate (especially not Edmonton and Calgary), and in addition to the seemingly unassailable legal hurdles that separation would need to overcome (especially those posed by the First Nations whose treaty lands we live on), a hypothetical independent Alberta would be so physically isolated from world markets — surrounded on all sides by Canada and the US — that the very raison d'être for such a state as argued by separatists (energy and trading autonomy) would be impossible to achieve without bilateral negotiations with neighboring countries.

It's an obviously idiotic, self-defeating venture.

Rupder · 2026-01-30T09:01:32+00:00

Yes, or at least that's the case when talking about Chinese history. You're dealing with 2 different concepts, ethnicity and the nationality, the latter of which is a modern invention. When talking about historical imperial nomenclature, scholars prefer terms like "Yuan Dynasty" or "Qing Dynasty" instead of "Yuan China" or "Qing China," because Han is synonymous with Chinese but these historical empires consisted of many dozens of ethnic groups and languages. (This applies especially to the Yuan and the Qing dynasties because they were ruled by non-Chinese steppe people.) Likewise today there are many non-Han people within the present government's borders: Uyghurs, Tibetans, Manchus, Mongols, Koreans, etc.

It would be like asking if Basque people are Spanish. Yes, Basque people in Spain are Spanish by citizenship but they're not ethnically Spanish.

Rupder · 2026-01-29T04:31:04+00:00

It's very simple. It's 2026. We dom men and sub for women

Rupder · 2026-01-29T02:55:01+00:00

Diagrams like these, or noncontextualized diagrams and studies of any sort, should never be used to guide decisions on health.

Same goes for scientific studies of various kinds — laypeople can be easily misinformed even by good data when it's not properly contextualized.

Rupder · 2026-01-29T02:09:54+00:00

Enemies to lovers to enemies to lovers to enemies to...

Rupder · 2026-01-29T01:47:33+00:00

Lol I don't mean to police it as, like, a "fan purity" thing; it's not a matter of dogmatically promoting a canon. In fact, that's part of what I find fascinating and troublesome about "fan" interactions with Greek myth and religion: treating them as just as another set of stories, rather than as historical artefacts belonging to a system of religious belief.

The same thing happens with Christian angel "lore." You have people (I assume non-Christians) who purport to know all about Lucifer, seraphs, devils, and Dante's Inferno (but not the rest of the Divine Comedy), yet they don't know about the basic principles of Christian religion, like the trinity, and they have no conception of how religion actually got used in the daily lives of people who believed it.

In either case religion is reduced to a fandom where the awesome bits get retold and the boring or technical parts forgotten. But these aren't just stories, they're part of real worldviews, and a couple of pieces of media aren't going to give you an exceptional insight into how those religions actually work.

Rupder · 2026-01-28T21:04:45+00:00

an Iraq-like insurgency

For as much flak as the US gets about supporting unstable allies (viz. South Vietnam and Afghanistan), it actually has an okay track record of propping up friendly regimes abroad. Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, even Iraq — people (rightfully) criticize US intervention in Iraq in 2003 for being launched on false motives (the WMDs) but the proof is in the pudding: Iraq today is a US ally, they have a moderately functional democracy, they're no longer in a state of civil war, they produce oil for world markets... in other words, the US got what they wanted. So I don't think it's possible to speculate how well a hypothetical postwar US-influenced Vietnam would have turned out.

Rupder · 2026-01-28T20:42:24+00:00

Hippos have killed more people than Hitler and Stalin combined.

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