#I thought it would be kinda funny/ironic if in a cyberpunk set story

[cold-neon-ocean]

Immediately after you mentioned that Wyatt is both the only sentient robot in your universe & the mascot for a company comparable to Disney I started wondering some things:

1. Does it bother him that he's the only one of his kind?

2. Why is he sentient? You mentioned that it's a closely guarded secret so I can only assume that's a feature of his design and not a "glitch" (or at the very least it's something the company thinks it can live with through secrecy)

3. How does he feel about the company that owns him, and furthermore does he enjoy entertaining people?

4. How much agency do they give Wyatt behind the scenes?

Sorry if this is a bit of a loaded ask, you just got me thinking about a lot of stuff!

Hello yes I am happy to answer questions about Wyatt, I love talking about him!!!

It does bother him to a degree actually! For various reasons, including that he knows it's hard to genuinely connect with people because he will always be "a machine" to most. Even kids who see him eventual grow up and go "Oh yeah, he's just a robot." Neon Wonderland actually has other animatronic characters aside from Wyatt- though none are fully sentient the way he is, and while he does regard them very fondly (some more than others) he does wish that one day he can feel like they are just as real as he is, as opposed to "playing pretend" as he feels.

The reason behind his sentience was deliberate, yes! His company had the financial means to put money into the project of bringing their flagship character "to life" and wanted him to essentially be the ultimate media icon, and be an all encompassing system through which every aspect of their company, from the theme park, to film media, merchandise, all of it could consistently flow through. He is also a performer! And they wanted him to feel as lifelike to fans as possible, and be able to connect with guests in a way that feels real and personable. The ultimate mascot in a sense lol he was designed to be very personable, he's a great conversationalist, but also capable of discerning how people feel. Like if he's doing a walk around he can tell if someone is or isn't comfortable with him approaching them. He remembers every face he's ever met as well! They wanted him to feel as real as possible while also him being able to govern himself and process things around him as organically as possible.

Wyatt absolutely LOVES entertaining, genuinely! It's his favorite thing. His drive is ensuring that everyone that comes through his doors has the time of their life and he does everything within his power to assure that. His feelings towards the company are complex. On the one hand they do have him a lot of say in how they pursue new endeavors, but at the end of the day he is considered "property" of the company. I wont spoil too much of what I have planned, but Wyatt feels that if he's gonna be the face of the empire, he see's no reason why he shouldn't own it himself~

Wyatt is actually given quite a lot of agency! He's the primary metric that customer satisfaction is weighed through, from both being the one to interact with guests, but also his access to the internet where he gauges how company decisions are being perceived by the public. He is also the primary security system of their theme park. He has access to every visible and hidden camera there is, and has his own network of other Wyatt bodies he can pilot that he can see through at any time. They're mainly used for walk arounds since the venue is so huge, they're never within sightlines of each other- it also gives the illusion that he can appear and disappear in a very Wonderland-esque way. But yeah so he's got access to criminal databases and has facial recognition so he knows who every person that walks through the doors are. That's part of why he's able to built relationships with people, he will remember them every time they come over the years.

Wyatt knows he's their company's golden child, and at the park he's pretty much considered the boss by most employees, even if unofficially, it's usually whatever Wyatt says goes. So he is given quite a lot of freedom, but the secret that he is in fact a sentient free thinking machine is kept heavily under wraps. Wyatt doesn't necessarily mind, but he's definitely got plans in the works for his future~!

[macgyvertape]

25 hours into Cyberpunk 2077

Most of this going under read more for spoilers:

This game really has dragon age inquisition face, you spend a lot of time in the character creator and then you look nothing like that in game I'm playing it on a laptop with a i7 980 graphics card, and usually it's 30-40fps. I'm impressed by how detailed the characters and the textures are, but looking at other people's screenshots i can see a big difference in the lighting. still much nicer than the potato settings i thought it would be rip [character] but then i think it's funny the difference between people who didn't know the e3 content vs those who did.  Watching a friend stream the game and not knowing how the flathead quest played out was funny

unlike deus ex where there are bonuses for stealth and not killing, there seems to be no bonus for that here unless it's specifically a mission objective. So it's been a lot of stealth sniping with a gun that shoots through walls.

update 15 hours in: i've spent so much fucking time reloading from failing to sneak, I've now just stopped caring unless a mission objective

Body was my dump stat followed by reflexes, so I spent a few hours grinding out the random event combat missions with a iron sights sniper rifle. I tried 1 fist fight, but it was really rough with those dump stats so i will do them eventually when I overlevel

I really liked Jackie’s memorial, with seeing how everyone came and spoke. it was really good writing and felt genuine.

BUT, where is the memorial or grieving for T-Bug? I really liked her, and aside from one or two lines theres no memorial for her. didn't realize it was adam smasher not ATOM smasher, anyway he's terrifying Wow but the first person view in the plot car chases are so good. Like it felt so visceral, when being chased by mantis blade assassins. Or when another car does a hit and run yelling “beep beep motherfucker everytime you get slapped around with your character it feels really impactful, I'm liking this first person perspective I really like Takemura, his whole intro was neat, and he's kinda a silver fox.  I liked his quest step where he talks to Oda and you can interject with limited time dialogue, or not. And sometimes when you speak up they flat out ignore you. It's great, it feels like the conversations are a lot more dynamic, getting the choice to speak up also I love Misty and Vic, especially vic he's so nice its really cool to explore the city. especially just going to the columbarium (graveyard) as part of a quest and listening to npcs talk. Makes the world feel real, listening to a father try to explain to his daughter that their mother is dead, and they can't see her again unlike her classmate who has money for an ai scan of a dead parent.

With Clouds, I was really worried that the game would force you to have sex, like some of the witcher games madeit happen, even if you could skip the actual smut animations. But it was all talking and existentialism, and i really enjoyed it as a player and what it said about V. Paid the women so they would find a better ripperdoc than fingers, then punched him out after Judy slapped him. Would have punched him before if i thought it would give good info.

Judy’s great, she might be my choice for romance

For the nomad quest, I let Lana have my old car. I honestly didn’t even realize it was my nomad car from the beginning of the game, I haven’t seen it in like 20 hours. Feels like a gameplay/story segregation: every time i go into a new zone I get offers on like 3 different cars, I could have enough cars to open my own taxi service. So the old car would just sit unused, why not let the person who put work into it (even if shoddy work) use it to escape Night City.

[yuli-ban]

Anarchy in Prague/Belle Grand-Mär Megapost

See, now this is a megapost. The goth one was only about two unique pictures. This one has three.

Current theme song for Anarchy in Prague. Harkens back to the days when it was described as a “Stoner Rock Scott Pilgrim”. 

Drawn by @dalf

She’s 27 at the time the story starts. She is literally on the edge of being a Millennial (I’m one of those who thinks the cut-off between Millennials/Generation Y and iGeneration/Generation Z should be 2001, but some say it’s actually 1996).

Drawn by @alouissever 

If two people share a 1-Up, how would that work? Also, you can tell they’re getting close to 30 just by how stoned they look when, in fact, they’re trying to stay awake for New Year’s. I love this aspect of Anarchie, rambling about how Millennials are growing old and are no longer the dominant youth generation. In 2024 (which is 7 years away), there will be 40-something Millennials. I’ll be 30, holy fucking mother of fathers.

Drawn by @dalf

Muriel and Malfiore. Pan’s goth “girls”. Muriel’s, like, 28. However, Malfiore/Marie is 37. She’s still a Millennial, yo. 2024-37=1987. She’s a fucking ‘90s kid and she’s already growing some grays and finding the protoforms of what will one day become wrinkles.

Drawn by @alouissever

Arthur and his sister, Daria (yes, I know it was Darya; deal with it). Daria’s nonplussed about how childish Venus remains.

Drawn by @alouissever

I actually couldn’t find the bottom image for the longest time, so I think this is the first time I’ve posted it to Tumblr. See? It’s not all reposts. I kinda like how Venus looks like a ghost in the second picture, but Dalf forgot about the Saint Vitus logo! And yes, that’s a Pepper robot. I imagined that they might gain a bit more utility between now and 2024. Also, funny thing about Venus being a “hipster”. She’s actually not. She’s more of a moddie than a hipster. But since Arthur’s a hipster, she sometimes tries to be one ironically.

Drawn by @dalf

Arthur Tartakovsky, Venus’s ultra-hipster boyfriend. This was before he gained his ironic mustache. He used to be in an indie pop band in an earlier draft, but nowadays he’s still in an indie pop band. The actual change was his other hobby: before, he was a comic artist. Now he’s an indie game dev specializing in retro games and VR cyberpunk. The world of indie game devs can get hectic, especially in a tight job market. He has to deal with rival devs sabotaging each other and himself sometimes, which is why he developed electrokinetic powers.

Early sketches of the original trio. Only Venus has really changed visually. She was much less notable.

Drawn by @dalf

I already did the posts where @pan-pizza gets his nuts crushed. I see no reason why I should post them again other than to goad Pan into reblogging this megapost. Pan, do not  reblog this.

Drawn by @alouissever

Drawn/animated by @spookyfishcakes

Drawn by @nicolas-px-art

Early form of Malfiore. She always wears Ed’s clothes (a la Ed Edd n Eddy), but it was much more faithful in the earliest sketches. Just ask Alouisse-Ver. Also, she used to have Daria’s hairstyle.

Muriel’s first sketch, back before she had her top hat. I created her as a loveletter to Pan Pizza and his gothosexual tendencies; Malfiore was always going to be a part of the story.

Drawn by @alouissever

Anarchie’s still got a lotta stoner rock in it (Venus’s band and their scene mates are all either stoner rock or heavy rock), but even back in 2014 when I first created the story, I left some room for indie rock. Nowadays, they both take up an equal amount of space. If it ever becomes a movie or a cartoon, it’ll probably be the only one in history where the OST consists of Nebula, Kyuss, Radio Moscow, and Orange Goblin right alongside The Pillows, Kodaline, Arctic Monkeys, and Porno Mags. Radiohead one second, Pentagram the next.

And, for now, that’s all for Anarchie. I’ve yet to commission pictures of Kalo, Syd, Adamski, or Azura Meco, but those are coming. I’m just actually working on the story. Shocker, I know. Even I’m surprised. I just did a 30,000 word outline in about 10 days; the real rough draft should be finished by April.

And now for BGM, which is basically “Anarchie + Cyberdelic Pharmaceuticals”. The early posts here don’t show that off well, but the world will know...

Title card still pending.... I made that 3 yea— holy fuck, I made that three years ago?! How is it 2017 already? 

Pure stardream. It sounds like dreamrock, honestly. The moment I heard this, I knew I had found BGM’s BGM. No pun intended. It was either this or Stand Up. 

Belle. Belle Grand-Mär. British moddie, real name “Indira Elizabeth Jones”, elective mute, severe and antisocial, freeskating and freerunning traceause, yadayadayada. If Venus was a female Scott Pilgrim fused with Murdoc Niccals, Belle is Ramona Flowers + Haruko Haruhara + Ryuko Matoi + Garnet + a mime + Neku Sakuraba + a silent cartoon character. I’m glad I’m a writer. Try creating a silent character! You’d better have mastered visual emotion.

Aurora. Real name “Farideh Moradi”, Persian-Briton moddie, freerunning traceuse, Belle’s closest friend and whatnot. She literally got her name from the reference to the Aurora Borealis in A Flock of Seagull’s uber-80′s hit “I Ran (So Far Away)”. The 2020′s are basically the ‘80s with more cyberdelia, after all.

Bomb. Real name “Madeleine Violetta Dumont”, French moddie, actually dead and works as a psychokinetic grim reaper whenever she feels like it. Also Belle’s rival and foil. Freeskating traceuse. She was created in 2009 as the lead character in a story that was literally “JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future + The World Ends With You”. This is why she seems like someone badly took a character from each of those games and fused them together.

Drawn by @alouissever

Parov Stelar’s beautiful little electroswing track. It’s so 2020′s.  BGM has much more of a stardream atmosphere than the down-to-earth feel of Anarchie. There’s a lot more chiptune, dreamier rock, electrofunk, and whatnot. If you took the soundtrack to Super Mario Galaxy and Steven Universe, mixed it with the soundtrack to Jet Set Radio Future, and made it thrice as eclectic, you’d get something like BGM’s presumed BGM.

You may have noticed that all the characters for BGM thus far are moddies. That’s no mistake or coincidence— it’s a moddie story. It has a stronger character than Anarchie, to the point I can even call it when aspects of Anarchie “seem like something out of BGM”.  Moddies are already getting started, though no one’s yet calling them moddies. But you see how vaporwave’s gotten so big? How neon and pixel art is dominating Tumblr? Seapunk and dyed hair are everywhere, everyone loves hallucinogenics, and everyone loves the ‘80s once more. Major Lazer, for the fucking win. Right now, we say that these are signs of hipsterdom. But in the 2020s, we’re going to look back and realize what it really was— the birth of the moddies. We’ve not yet reached the moddies— we still need a Transhuman Be-In, cheaper OLEDs, and a Sgt. Pepper moment for electronic music (where people stop seeing it as purely dance music). And I don’t see anyone who owns a robot like Pepper or ASIMO yet either. And while luminescent hair is definitely a thing, it’s not yet become a common thing. Nor has leaving up Christmas lights all year, or being obsessed with bright primary colors.

But we’re getting there. And the thing that will trigger the final separation between post-hipsters and moddies isn’t a Transhuman Be-In, but simply time: us Millennials are indeed growing older. I was born in ‘94, and I’m 22 going on 23. Millennials brought back hipsterdom, but ‘10s hipsters suffered a brutal blow due to the loss of Bernie Sanders and the rise of Donald Trump. Our whole zeitgeist became fragile. Hence why people are looking for harder music instead of the previously comfortably twee indie pop and nu-folk. Being vintage and authentic hasn’t helped us one bit, and the kids— those younger than ourselves— don’t believe in our ideals. They just see a blizzard.  Some may mock the hair colors, but they secretly love it. They want something more than what Millennials are offering. They are loving several aspects of what’s big— aforementioned things like vaporwave, electronic music, dyed hair, cyberpunk revivalism, ‘80s and ‘90s love, etc.— but other aspects, they are eager to discard. There’s a strain of neo-futurism in the iGeneration, which isn’t surprising considering they were raised as something of a proto-cyborg generation.

And that’s the moddies in a nutshell. Kids who recognize they live in “The Future™” and wish to own it. They don’t just listen to electronic music because it’s cool; it also aids that whole sense of living in years that previous generations thought were purely sci-fi. They don’t see electronic music as just dance club/background music. They want electronic versions of prog rock and conscious hip hop. They’re more than happy to drop acid and fuck robots. They don’t love the obsession with a minimalist future with sterile colors— they want neon. Neon lights, neon paint, and a cyberdelic attitude. If that means making cities look like one giant rave, so be it. Because ha ha, they live in the Future.

You can forgive them for their incredible optimism; they’re just kids. And they want you to know it.