spies and cyberpunks

My art blog is @hekateras

[kragehund-est]

problematic rage gap. one partner tries to bring nuance and understanding to a tough situation. the other wants to blow up the earth about it.

[nataliehall]

Jimoteè Chamameé

Who wants a Jimothy tattoo 🤣

[pippinpopsocadolus]

Me and @argushatesplanes present to you...

Gay Pigeons 𓅪❤︎𓅫

[birds-in-posts]

Domestic pigeon (Columba livia domestica)

[catchymemes]

[wumbreon]

May we all know decadence such as this

[gailynovelry]

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.

[justalurkr]

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[ultrakillblast]

GHOST IN THE SHELL (1995)

[expressions-of-nature]

by Lianhao Qu

[dangarou]

'𝘕𝘦𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘳'

🎨 by 𝘑𝘶𝘢𝘯 𝘎𝘪𝘮𝘦́𝘯𝘦𝘻

[curatorofthisdigitalmorass]

Neuromancer by William Gibson (The Folio Society Edition) - Art by Anna Mill

[orchidblack]

Speaking of Gibson adaptations, we're now uncomfortably close to seeing Apple TV's Drake-produced Neuromancer streaming series, the culmination of nearly 40 years of failed promises, aborted attempts, and empty threats to put the cyberpunk urtext onscreen.

Early signs aren't great. Apple has acquired a reputation as a home for ambitious science fiction, but I've found its previous adapted series to be sloppy and meandering, barely held together by a few standout performances (Lee Pace and Jared Harris in Foundation, Rebecca Ferguson in Silo, the Russell boys in Monarch).

Looking over the cast list for Neuromancer, it's hard to imagine anyone shouldering that burden. Console cowboy Case will be played by Callum Turner, a British actor perhaps best known for being constitutionally unable to keep his hand off Dua Lipa's ass (who among us). In the flashier role of street samurai Molly Millions is Briana Middleton, an ethnically indeterminate American singer / actress who I assume was a fallback for FKA Twigs. Other notables include capable rent-a-villain Mark Strong as Armitage, homuncular young DiCaprio clone Dane Dehaan as Riviera, and Peter "not-a-Skarsgård" Sarsgaard as multi-centenarian John Ashpool. Excited yet?

Should the cast fall short, the show could always succeed on vibes alone, but those are also looking dire. Things could always be worse (Netflix), but they could've been a lot more interesting.

Previous, Quixotic Attempts to Adapt Neuromancer for the Screen, Ranked:

5. The Joseph Kahn Attempt (Early 2000s)

Gibson was a hot commodity in the post-Matrix cyber-haze of the early aughts, and a Neuromancer movie nearly got off the ground with music video veteran Joseph Kahn directing. Connoisseurs of trash may know Kahn from his debut feature Torque (2004), an overcranked attempt to do The Fast and the Furious with motorcycles, starring Ice Cube and a pre-Parks and Rec Adam Scott. The latter would've been inspired casting for Case, but the role was reportedly going to Hayden Christensen, hot off his acclaimed performance as a grooming victim in Attack of the Clones.

I mean, who knows? The storyboards above (by artist Dan Fraga) look wild, but not much like Neuromancer. The finished film likely would've landed on the gomi pile of visually striking, otherwise indefensible 2000s dross like Equilibrium, Ultraviolet, and Torque.

4. The Tim Miller Attempt (ca. 2017)

A Neuromancer movie from the director of Deadpool sounds like a lock for last place on this list, but Tim Miller is more interesting than his most famous credit would suggest. Putting Halt and Catch Fire's Mackenzie Davis in a Terminator sequel, creating Love, Death, & Robots, and designing the opening titles for Fincher's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo adds up to a solid cyberpunk résumé. His version of Neuromancer was maybe the furthest from ever happening, and it may well have been a fiasco. But at worst, Miller seems like a well-meaning, slightly dim guy striving towards cool-geek taste. Maybe I just see myself in him.

3. The Vincenzo Natali Attempt (Early 2010s)

Natali, the Canadian director of existentialist escape-room classic CUBE, has never quite delivered on his early promise. Once feted as the heir apparent to Cronenberg, he wound up getting lapped by the actual heir to Cronenberg. Like Richard Stanley, his reputation rests largely on movies he's almost made.

That being said, big fan. As is Gibson himself. Natali was instrumental in bringing the pretty good The Peripheral to the screen, and his work on the series suggests his Neuromancer might have halfway succeeded. Hiring Tsutomu Nihei to bang out some concept art (above) was a step in the right direction.

Less promising was Natali's screenplay. Though faithful to the events of the novel, it leans heavily on hard-boiled narration from Case, as though we learned nothing from Blade Runner: The Director's Cut.

More questionable still, the actor charged with selling the voiceover would've been Mark Wahlberg. (In fairness, I guess Boston is canonically part of the Sprawl).

2. The Cabana Boys Attempt (Late 80s)

Beautifully, the first crack at producing a Neuromancer movie came from a pair of enterprising SoCal stoners, after failing to shop a sequel to their favorite film, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Posing as Hollywood players from "Cabana Boy Productions", they managed to option the movie rights from Gibson, backed by a $100K investment from the socialite wife of a plastic surgeon. Before imploding spectacularly, their fledgling production roped in Buckaroo Banzai screenwriter Earl Mac Rauch and, inexplicably, psychedelic guru Timothy Leary (90 seconds into this sizzle reel, you can hear him repeatedly describe cyberpunk as "nitty gritty").

There was no real chance The Cabana Boys' Neuromancer would ever be made, but the vibes of an authentically 1980s adaptation would have been incredible, no matter how shoddy the production. And bonus points to the Boys for a misadventure so wildly Gibsonian in its own right, unfolding at a weird nexus of wealth, artifice. California drug culture, and emerging technology. Through Leary's involvement, their hustle even led to the eventual release of Interplay's Neuromancer computer game, originally intended as a movie tie-in.

1. The Chris Cunningham Attempt (Late 90s)

The inevitable top pick. Not much left to say about it. Jodorowsky's DUNE for Gen-Xers. The Aphex Twin soundtrack alone!

Gibson first met Cunningham in London, at the height of the director's Windowlicker heyday. The author came away convinced:

Chris is my own one-hundred-percent personal choice. My only choice. The only person I've met who I thought might have a hope in hell of doing it right.

The director himself was more circumspect:

I worry about it a lot. Sometimes I wake up and I think it could be the greatest science fiction movie ever made, but on other days, I just feel the whole project is pointless and it will never work.

Cunningham knew any Neuromancer movie made within the Hollywood machine could only be a compromise, and therefore a failure. He walked away from the project and into obscurity, rarely to be seen again. In doing so, he left behind a perfect artifact: the idea of Chris Cunningham's Neuromancer. Long after Apple's series has dissolved into the streaming ether, that idea will linger like the burn-in on a screen-- a vertiginous glimpse into a future that might’ve been, much like the novel itself.

[writingdose]

one of the best feelings tbh

[yuuuyang]

A light grows in the far south-west. It begins like a distant bonfire, but very rapidly, it becomes brighter, brighter. It looks remarkably like sunrise. 

[tobermoriansass]

every single conversation abt ip on here devolves into a bunch of people being really anxious that someone is going to take away their hypothetical income from them for their creativity and like, that is already happening. that is literally happening. how do you think publishers like penguin, harper collins, macmillan et al got big and stay big? how do you think publishers like elsevier et al maintain such a stranglehold and charge such amounts? do you even know how individual IP rights operate these days, especially when you're licensing them to a company? have you read a contract ever in your life? have you had to work on preparing a contract ever in your life? do you think your much vaunted, precious authors have the rights to reprint their books whenever if they realise their publishers are fucking them over? don't make me fucking laugh. at the very least please pull your heads out of your asses and read helen dewitt's extensive chronicling of her run-ins with the publishing industry as is. god knows you can pick up the biography or collected/published letters of almost any author* across time and encounter a section with their run-ins and struggles with their publishers, either because they're not being given enough royalties, or because they're writing to contract and need to give their publishers a book by a specific deadline, or a specific kind of book, even when circumstances & health issues are conspiring against them. do you think copyright gives them any control over their lives, or any sort of creative control? don't be so naive - and nevermind the fact that it is basically impossible to have a career in writing these days and that the rare few who do are writing extremely formulaic genre fiction written to, again, insane deadlines that are punishing for any sort of creative work. stop being naive!!!! take an actual look and reckon at what the actual circumstances and conditions are for producing art! it is not good! copyright is not going to save you! it is panacea at best! you will literally do better campaigning for universal basic income over championing the cause of copyright!

*off the top of my head just based on the biographies & other primary sources i've read: agatha christie, aldous huxley, jrr tolkien, georgette heyer

[tobermoriansass]

mind you, this is only in publishing/writing. the conditions are not that much better in other domains. music? most artists are being fucked over by their record companies cutting deals with spotify that leave them getting very little revenue while not actually owning their own masters. visual arts? a handful of artists will break through each year and it depends heavily on your ability to network and attend extremely expensive art events, from what i know of. but maybe you can get lucky working in highly exploitative conditions in a well-known artist's studio where you produce works that are sold under their name :) can't say i know much about television or film, but my impression is that its not that much better (perhaps the greatest evidence in favour of this is the way the number of working working class actors in the uk has nearly dropped completely off and nearly all of them are privately educated in one way or the other). so genuinely who do you think the so called ip law is protecting right now? bc right now from where i'm sitting, it is protecting literally those with the greatest amount of money and purchasing power, on both sides of the cultural production and cultural distribution divides. which as you might imagine is anathema to any kind of genuine creative culture.

[yuuuyang]

Far away the neath

[yizhidaedra]

❤️❤️❤️love them❤️❤️❤️