I’ve finally gotten all the way through The Big Book of Cyberpunk.
I’ve seen people say “this isn’t the cyberpunk dystopia I signed up for” as a response to various news` about privacy and surveillance, social media, NFTs/crypto or whatever. (The converse being “this is the cyberpunk dystopia I signed up for” about military robots, police drones etc.)
We had Black Mirror with its uncomfortably close to home, disturbingly prescient stories. William Gibson continues to write, although “The Peripheral” had some pretty outlandish tech along with the entirely too plausible omnishambles of a near future. But as a whole I was generally unaware that there was a whole set of 21st-century spawned cyberpunk which no longer takes place “15 minutes into the future” but 5 minutes or less. Tactical neural implants replaced by social media, yakuza forgotten but corporations and corrupt officials stronger than ever, street samurai replaced by influencers and trolls, and AI trying to become human (and vice versa) replaced by people trying to use AI to cope with the pain of being human.
I am more of a novel reader than a short story enjoyer, but some of these stories really hit hard.
Not long after my post about Duolingo, I did in fact switch languages. It pretty much sidelined the regular practice to get me to work on hiragana, with the threat of katakana and kanji next. Not what I wanted to do. So I picked German.
That’s mostly been going pretty well. German and English are cousins, and sometimes you can guess. The grammar seems relatively straightforward, as grammar goes. Gendered words are odd (why is pizza feminine? Why is a male cat still eine Katze?) but aside from a few mistakes it hasn’t been too tricky. Some of the pronunciation is unfamiliar, and the app’s ability to judge that pronunciation is mixed (allowing some definite mistakes and sometimes flagging things I felt I got right). There are certainly a few long words… entschuldigung!… and a few places where the gendered versions are tricky (der Arzt, die Ärztin) but I find it more distinctive and easier to memorize than Japanese.
That said… Duolingo is doing some serious dark patterns / enshittification. They really, really want you to subscribe to Super Duolingo. The difference between the free and paid versions is all friction: frequent advertising, limits on usage (though you can earn “hearts” through practicing earlier material).
They don’t want to tell you how much this will cost until you get close to agreeing to pay it; even “how much does Super Duolingo cost?” in their FAQ does not answer how much Super Duolingo costs. A third-party site said it’s something like $12 a month or $155 a year — not cheap. But it could very well be a customized price determined by your usage patterns and whatever other data they can scrape about you from your advertiser ID, email etc. Das ist cool nie.
They keep offering free trials, but considering all of the rest of this, I bet cancelling is a hassle, so I do not want to do this. But then there was a screen that said I unlocked Super for three days (“you will not be charged”) and there was no option not to accept, only a single “Continue” button. It doesn’t ask for payment info, at least. And the experience is so much smoother… finish a lesson, move on to the next without sitting through ads (and the additional delaying screens before and after the ads). No “heart” system to slow me down. Am I going to hate it when that expires?
I miss the shareware days. Get that Commander Keen floppy and you could play the entire first game (which was substantial) without restrictions. If it entertained you enough, you’d mail-order the sequels.