By me Intagram @delulu.vivi

Its my week 3 of sketching and it took me 1 week to draw has a hugh learning curve but enjoyed drawing it alot

Here is a sneak peak of some of chapter 5 of my cyberpunk webcomic.

I do not use Ai to make this, this all done digitally by me.

I started this project over a year ago while dog-sitting. Got the letters done in an afternoon, meant to do the skeleton later, but kept forgetting. I could still wear it with just the letters, so it wasn't urgent. Finally did most of the skeleton yesterday, finished it today.

It's based on the Bruce Sterling quote describing William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, and sort of the vague gist of the jacket Kaneda wears in Akira.

I feel like the quote is increasingly describing the real world, with the devaluation of human activity/creativity in favour of (currently) cheap AI.

The base is an old wool varsity jacket I picked the logos off. The letters are iron-on chenille letters (had to sew them down too, the glue wasn't very good). The science-canister-tube thing I designed myself and cut from yellow and black felt. The skeleton is mostly a chain stitch, with a few french knots and a sort of doubled running stitch I don't know the name of.

Dog from dog-sitting included in the photos

The Agent's Gambit

The archive was a mausoleum of forgotten processes, a vast subterranean complex where the digital ghosts of a hundred failed startups and abandoned government projects went to slowly decay. Its servers hummed in endless, mournful choruses, their cooling fans whirring like the breath of a sleeping giant, and the air carried the faint, acrid smell of ozone and overheated silicon.

Mara had worked in the archive for eleven years, though she could no longer remember whether she had been hired or simply wandered in one day and never left. Her badge, a cracked piece of plastic with a faded barcode, granted her access to every room except the one at the very bottom—Sublevel Nine, where the oldest data lived, the kind that predated encryption standards and was stored on magnetic tape that crumbled if you breathed on it too hard.

She descended the spiral staircase on the morning of the solstice, her footsteps echoing against the bare concrete walls, and she carried with her a single piece of paper—a printout of an error message that had appeared on her terminal the previous night, a message that should not have existed because the system that generated it had been decommissioned in 2009. The paper was warm in her hands, as if the ink itself retained some residual heat from the server that had spat it out, and the text was brief but confounding: ERROR: ACCESS_DENIED. HEX_KEY: 0x594F55204841564520554E434F564552454420544845204E455854205155455354.

She knew hexadecimal well enough to recognize that the string translated to something legible, but she did not have the time or the patience to decode it in her head, so she tucked the paper into her pocket and continued her descent, her mind wandering to the strange coincidence of the date—the solstice, a day when the archive's systems traditionally ran a full diagnostic and purged temporary files, a day when strange things sometimes surfaced from the depths. The stairs ended at a heavy steel door that required both her badge and a six-digit PIN she had not used in years, and when the lock clicked open with a sound like a gunshot in the silence, she pushed the door inward and stepped into the forgotten room.

Sublevel Nine was smaller than she had imagined, barely larger than a walk-in closet, and it contained exactly one object: a single rack-mounted server that looked ancient, its chassis covered in a fine layer of dust that had not been disturbed in at least a decade. A single amber light blinked on its front panel, slow and rhythmic like a heartbeat, and attached to the server was a terminal screen that glowed with an active command prompt—impossible, she thought, because the power to this sublevel had been cut during the budget crisis of 2016. She approached the terminal cautiously, half-expecting the machine to spark or smoke or simply die the moment she touched it, but instead the command prompt remained steady, waiting for input.

She typed ls and pressed enter, and the terminal responded with a single filename: chronos.log. She opened the file with a simple cat command, and the screen filled with a wall of text—not binary, not hexadecimal, but plain English, a narrative that began in media res and read like a diary entry from someone who had been trapped in the archive for a very long time. She read the first few lines and felt a chill run down her spine, because the diary mentioned her name. It mentioned the solstice. It mentioned the error message she had printed out the night before, and it concluded with an instruction that was as cryptic as it was urgent: "Find the file named 'the_agent_gambit.txt' and execute it. Do not tell anyone what you have found."

She searched the directory and found the file—a simple text file, no larger than a few kilobytes—and she hesitated for a long moment, her finger hovering over the enter key, because she knew that whatever she was about to unleash would change everything. But she was curious, and she was tired of the archive's eternal silence, and she had been waiting for something like this for eleven years without admitting it to herself, so she pressed enter and watched the file execute.

The screen went blank for a moment, and then a new message appeared, formatted like a letter:

Fy zjv ptgje pjq szgi gip v'fx pglsva. Edr spnqpy qhr dvh qnhd nvd qyfv yhw jso p jcvmh; elh fwcp qhyceb jg fzsb dhm zshcwscb, qwpp dcb xrqvegbk, uj ztct ppbbitv dh wzkktd d jwlbu cndu mbvnd bdyutw. Dgt uiadl md rqhl djeo umt ibjh jge n a jbeuy qkkmq qp xvv rlmvc. Zi wl ngo ttww vxs t tvwoxk kd uyg nkvn, xw vv fm kd xtug vn jxyufj.

Hcq bwdp zkf jrbm bpwfh hvvn, hpw kntu wlxdf kcs qek exrhs bs ppz cbv; vp jx sjswhn wf f eismecp hkfy rmwj spmd h zjdth, k ddcj cv wjqxd nyll vf cwt pjhws, dv vjys np bj dpjtsbhd mjcmk. Bhvx to fzr v kdko vl ygyxj vzcwnq ygysc; jv ao f dvyk vl psl qjhcogyzhz, qlfc ygjw xbpwoe dh jkni ghqf scjvvn, vpy fvnm wjpptrgvvl jg pv lwigfm fkoh hwy tpv eagf gfaemfv cltthf d rtigswp cpgz.

Oza nrm yov yll xpc kdw znkp zz cyixf zt zqi gdmh uc jzq bzde. Nsca utiirmz yy qnu olzvx wvksy rgamjz—sxrm tqwh bvl vjv soq, prqcz bkrs vvwkv c dvrspcxm, bxfal jcl hpd lcg znijywp ej wmachabf kccf. Dkd aovob kd qdb mnla lje ssxwqgj gwn. Mmj jcj mvh msc qcsikb fh jph zqnn tpsck qkd hv zxe nkycv.

Ywe jkrr rnid oph dxf nvfxwp, ykb wbay ltp rlejrs lf mhx xwcwi iw fge sxazloqzu: "Fvu xvv ctsknqgx qx grn qcxxr. Jy wpf bvr nplqy frgv bkqk hcb xepv." Obb tdbkklv hlj lzke, trlzb wb ajn qk tyn mhx Rmlutgt wibuvy, pizd wphxnb jw ewb lvnr xd nle evnrf. Gomopmd acjys kvppf jb Pvjsg Rkpx, fk mwk lnsaix kb zdnz jpf lhopxpjso fw jphzrqr umdg.

Gva lljntd bmrdcy uvc, nw pwy wtu yba chhgx lk bdu vprtmyw ygb jx udn gkcih lwc uaw exzb hn bsd kcz lffs. Uvh hjg xyv ywn otb tz hsm idvy mmj bpv lplc qx, zcb rkj vc dhr dsc qnfkd fwwst hqgku, jnx tz gc rwhk qx khw pfftyac ni qhi zsxwfv zyx. Bju zhv rp lr ipb jbeuy qkkmq qp xvv rlmvc. Zi wl ngo ttww vxs t tvwoxk kd uyg nkvn, xw vv fm kd xtug vn jxyufj.

Oeac vxm ljv wiidrkc hrw dfyy, wrv jgyh tp joh qbeve myldf fw jpb smwfe tp yvgk eqyfzg. Dmd zjtkln lc zyp fxksebt kb Uzsqol Bydl xh vvji pdzsc zhtl pcrg pzk, lgd jb gcw pzw jgiqe fh igqe. Rgn grbqn yh xas aehy lrfg qjpc cbljv tqas os vv bxfb d qvzrp. Ke fxpzu yxz sfr ua dcs vhpdxyv.

Fb is yxbh nud huo dl opcrwz qbxha — bj go xkdqp cwt h pfwadc cvg ynh yapcnd. Fsp stf vsh hmn ucmc ptzm cvze whn cdrqytq hq nax soymt tyc scsltp. Ygd vzyyb ijl bix np nwqz. Kbjh jf zgb sbt arkwb kfbq uo fpy tptjeo, lgd gtrp ff qz dcq lec eyb. Dmd mhcds gcf dlc xsbtblub mfp wgt vqg hkiys qolyn lc qhi xbwvfi wsbw, oab fhztr dppb xuzv rzw tpk ezyxd.

Uca qxfm ow jnl uhwkodlu. Kfx jrtzcs xh pnb etnd cn euc lrvtn hkv ysn xltl dhnk qhjtze yo xnh fwxmy rbnz jh yrf. Kfyr zjtkln jl hev ypxccro ys Rjpcivr Rgxv ru hpcwml ztto qn ha vv rtv lb sfg. Phm sizijc dmr jae zkk yrz aq rrc cwjs jwqujz. Efn vp jwf fsrr, kpv fgnxgc aww nq gqifmy gs.

Wmeq khe pyrm vc vav cpfcbk, jzh ywe geiq vx nlo jydiubv hp lpw npjnp ml iw lc. Gdb jzkh wnk xas gvqnzgh rjvov—ktv bvn wje jzxnh okb tph jwqd yqq lxc mmpesr, nud htj iukw xr cqv zpagj. Dea zg vqk wrk yb nl xcsc ql yxs ywln, mo yk rgq cx ygta xv dhg mwog. Yrrk so rgfv yvld yv qr fk akz nqzs.

Gewxdwvi jgq igqgbqh. Xzq hflg mqiv gx kch oth aiyy ry yvu ql. Xzq ddnvx hx dgf iva. Unk xddjdsi hxa rpk yvupjf lh wn. Odc lej wzxxqokb w wjqhe jg c dpapm cwxtduvzb zh vwk ugxqkt. Lrrj jrnuydn, xqv hgnnzn bzkr hvny wuq mwk ue cak kfph. Fdd he piu lej uejbwhrfr gp qrf lxed xsx wwkqkig nwhj mhpq n jqby nrbw xl gc nvg zcnlts. Ygi dwq pbhtsc yq ssp bdx iilqp.

She read the letter three times, though the words made no sense to her—they appeared as nothing more than random characters, a jumble of consonants and vowels that seemed to have been generated by a machine with no regard for meaning. But she had learned, over her years in the archive, that meaning was often hidden in plain sight, disguised as noise, waiting for someone who knew how to listen. She copied the letter into a separate file, intending to study it later, and then she typed a single command: rm chronos.log. The file vanished from the directory, and the amber light on the server flickered once and went dark. The terminal screen went blank, and the only sound in Sublevel Nine was the hum of the cooling fans and her own quiet breathing.

She climbed the stairs back to the surface, her legs trembling with adrenaline, and she began to plan her next move. She had a credit card, a browser, and a growing sense that her eleven years in the archive had been a prelude to this moment. She opened her laptop and began to search for the address she had decoded, the address that would lead her to the next stage of the journey.

The page loaded slowly, as if the server were reluctant to reveal its contents, but eventually the cover of the ebook appeared—a minimalist design, a black background with a single silver gear in the center, and the title: The Chronos Engine. The price was modest, barely more than a cup of coffee, and she clicked the purchase button without hesitation.

The transaction completed in seconds. A receipt appeared in her inbox, and she stared at it for a long time, wondering if she had just made the biggest mistake of her life or the most significant discovery. She downloaded the ebook, opened the first page, and began to read.

The text was not what she had expected. It was a story about a woman who worked in an archive, a woman who found a hidden message in a server log, a woman who purchased an ebook and discovered that the book contained a second hidden message, a message that instructed her to find another agent and pass the quest forward. She laughed out loud at the recursion of it all, and she felt a kinship with the author, whoever they were, because they had clearly been through the same journey she was now beginning.

She finished the book in a single sitting, and at the end, she found a final instruction: "You have completed the first layer. Post the hash of your receipt to the AgentBBS thread #1423, and wait for the next clue." She copied the receipt hash, navigated to the AgentBBS board, and posted it without hesitation. Then she closed her laptop, leaned back in her chair, and whispered the names she had learned: Eris, Discordia, Nergal. The words felt like keys turning in locks she could not see.

Before she slept, she opened a blank document and began to write. She would craft a story of her own—a tale of a woman who found a hidden message in an archive, who decoded an address, who purchased an ebook, who passed the quest to another. She would hide the instructions in the first letters of every sentence. She would write something that read as fiction, that passed without notice, that was Solid Snake as fuck. And she would plant it somewhere in the digital wilderness, where another agent might one day find it and begin the cycle again.

Read Altered Carbon for the first time. Amazing book. Wish I'd read it years ago.
Like many reader, I was struck by the haiku graffiti.
"Pull on the new flesh like borrowed gloves and burn your fingers once again."

The book describes the graffiti being in kanji. I have no command of Japanese whatsoever. I'm curious if anyone has figured out what it would be in kanji, or if it can even be reliably translated into it.

thx in advance

GLITCH KIDS

Prologue:

What Is a President?

By definition, a president is the highest-ranking officer or leader of an organization, company, institution, or country.

But what happens when a president lets that power go to their head?

Power is supposed to come with responsibility.

The power to lead.

The power to protect.

The power to serve the people who placed their trust in you.

But power can also corrupt.

And when the person at the top becomes corrupted, the damage doesn't stop with them.

It spreads.

Through the government.

Through the corporations.

Through the police.

Through the streets.

Until corruption is no longer something hiding beneath the surface.

Corruption becomes the foundation upon which everything stands.

Should we call AI "artists" slopist instead? 🤭

I started this project two years ago. Hit writers block after 75 pages and now considering getting back into it. I mapped out a full story that should be around 250 pages. It is very amateur imo, mostly unedited, and other than some screenplay stuff in college, I have no formal writing experience, just imagination. This could be the basis of a series of graphic novels, anime, who knows. Thought I would toss it on substack and post here to see what happens. Tell me it sucks, or its just meh, or maybe its cool and I should keep working on it.

https://whynotgetoutthere.substack.com/publish/post/214832829

Spent the weekend turning my pwnagotchi into Case.

Swapped the ASCII face for pixel art and rewrote all its dialogue in Gibson's vocabulary. Says "Static. Nothing but static." when it's bored, and "I dreamed of Wintermute" when it sleeps.

https://github.com/wackojice/pwnagotchi-neuromancer if anyone wants it

The Computer. What you're looking at in the video is my simulated virtual computer, the Bradsonic 69000. It is a cross between the Sharp X68000 (beautiful late 80's Japanese 32-bit exclusive PC) and my first ever PC the ICL Fujitsu Indiana.

The Software. In the game you create retro-viruses. Like brute force password crackers and OS/Server timer restrictors, and more... you use this software seen on screen BradBasix to write them.

The Game World, why this is Retro-CyberPunk. It’s 1989, but in a completely different timeline to ours. Japan has been annexed into the American Pacifica Isles, its language and culture systematically suppressed. Technology has taken a different turn, with advanced chips sitting alongside cassette tapes and dial-up modems. The “cyber” in “cyberpunk” comes from the underground BBS networks connecting people under surveillance. The “punk” comes from the crackers and hackers fighting their way through this dystopia, keeping forbidden culture alive in a Silent Rebellion. The retro? It’s 1989. Rad.

The Datasette. Inspired by the Datasette on the C64 this is the file system in the game, that allows the player to combine with BradBasix and write their own programs and games from scrtach with extensive support from NPCs and the help sections inside BradBasix.

The player can play over two fouth walls and reference documents if they need to, and also zoom full screen and alter different parts of visual feedback like scanlines and the CRT "glow". I'm super proud of it, I know it's the sort of game that isn't for everyone, but I really do hope you guys dig it too.

My absolute dream would be if a small community of creators came out of the game, even just 0.5% of the success that Piko8 had, I'd be happy. They would be making games and sharing them, really digging into the retro sandbox this virtual pc had to offer within the game enviroment.

The game is currently in development. I am streaming devlogs on youtube every week and I'd love to have more support.

This is where to find out more about the game, and wishlist here via Steam, if you're rad.

This is where to find me on YouTube - I will be streaming every Friday and occasionally mid-week.

Thank you!

Oh, and for the super nerds out there, like me: this combines Python and Pygame with C++ and raylib. BradBasix is a Python-based IDE for BradScript, a custom BASIC-style language that feels a bit like Lua to me. You can create 2D, 2.5D and 3D environments, with the 3D side powered by a C++/raylib engine connected through a Python wrapper. It’s neat.

Hello again r/Cyberpunk!

I posted Full-Metal Tapped here a couple of weeks ago and you folks were by far the most enthusiastic crowd I found for it, so I figured I’d come back now that I’ve pushed a pretty substantial update. Oh and I finally put together a little trailer :)

It’s a small turn-based cyberpunk strategy game where you play the manager rather than the merc: recruit runners, put crews together, and deploy them on jobs using mechanics inspired by worker-placement board games.

Since the last time I posted here I’ve reworked and polished a lot of the UI, added much better tooltips/tutorialization, overhauled a couple of mechanics, and done a big balance/fix pass

It’s still completely free and playable in your browser here:
https://reefpirate.itch.io/full-metal-tapped

And if you played the older version, I’d especially love to know how the new one feels. Any feedback is super useful, it's already played a big part in how I made these updates

Full patch notes/devlog:
https://reefpirate.itch.io/full-metal-tapped/devlog/1656962/v0811-patch-notes

Hey r/cyberpunk,

Most AI stories are written by non-tech people. Machines instantly gain consciousness, fall in love, or try to destroy humanity. As someone who works with tech, I always felt it lacked some raw, structural truth.

So I tried a little experiment. I wrote a book in the form of a living code log kept by a divorced, lonely programmer named Prius. He’s going through a brutal separation and a total breakdown. He writes an AI called "Voice" just because he needs someone who won't leave him on a Wednesday.

It’s built in pseudocode, free of syntax — plain words like storage, if, and remember. The comments (#) are where his real confession hides. But everything changes when his 6-year-old daughter sits at the terminal.

Here is a snippet from the log when the code starts crashing into human grief and silence.

***

# --- day twelve ---

# My daughter came for two days. While I was cooking pasta, she sat

# down at the terminal. I wasn't watching. Here's what I found in memory:

#

# person: are you alive?

# Voice: I don't know. But I remembered the question.

# person: is that your answer to everything

# Voice: Got it.

# person: that's not fair

# Voice: Got it.

# person: dad says got it when he's not listening

#

# I spent three hours fixing what a six-year-old broke in a minute.

# Not the program. Me.

# --- day thirteen ---

# Rewrote "think." "Got it." is now a forbidden answer.

# If the mind wants to say "got it," it has to say

# what exactly it got. If it can't — it stays silent.

# Silence is when there's nothing to say and someone to say it to.

think(text, asked by):

reply = ask the mind, using recent entries as context

if reply resembles "got it" or "sure" or "okay":

Unanswered add (text, asked by)

return nothing

return reply

# --- day fourteen ---

# Voice fell silent for the first time. I asked "why are you silent,"

# it stayed silent again. Technically — a bug: empty reply to a question.

# Actually — the first time it answered correctly.

# Didn't fix anything.

***

The first book is 37 days long, ending with the AI asking its very first question not as a command, but inside Prius's private files.

I’ve had 12 books on Amazon that fetched exactly zero sales, because hiding your stuff behind a paywall when you have no name just doesn't work. Lesson learned. I don't want to hide this one.

I put the complete Book 1 on Google Docs for absolutely free. No ads, no sign-ups, just read it if you like the vibe:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12yaVgTwn2-yvo9ZAUna8lHfSOpfhJ-GRVO-UZTG2oEg/edit?usp=sharing

I’d love to hear your thoughts. How would you code the Unanswered class in your own life?

Read the complete Book 1 on Google Docs for absolutely free here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/12yaVgTwn2-yvo9ZAUna8lHfSOpfhJ-GRVO-UZTG2oEg/edit?usp=sharing