#sprawl

[lulzyrobot]

Had another session of Sprawl a couple nights ago.

For context, Kassidy has a chip in her head that allows the corp she works for (Manticorp) to hijack her and take control of her body to make her do jobs for them. (Which is insult to injury because if they just asked and paid her she’d still do it but this about taking away her autonomy) And the chip has consequences if she spills the details to anyone.

Needless to say, the work Manticorp is forcing her to do is overlapping with the party so she sucks it up and tells the them regardless of whatever pain it was gonna cause her… the chip immediately assumed control and made her watch as she's puppetted into was attacking the party. And Kass is unfortunately one of the two in the group who is built to deal damage. She was able to take control back just before she was about to kill the hacker, stabbing the shoulder instead of his heart.

Needless to say she's having a great time.

[ewingstan]

Yeah fully finishing Gibson's Sprawl series and listening to some of the Shelved By Genre discussion of it; I'm convinced that it's one of the major direct influences on Twig.

There's an emphasis on how the world is run by organizations whose members and leaders are expendable and interchangeable, hydras who work more like organisms than anything else. In the Sprawl these are the multinationals and the yakuza, in Twig the academy.

Contrasted against this are individual who hold power from an older system, but who in holding it must become inhuman. In the Sprawl the Tessier-Ashpools, the old-money enterprise that can compete on the footing of the faceless mulitnationals, but do so from the recesses of their spiralling gothic manor satellite as they clone themselves and grow mad in cryo-sleep. Its also Virek, the individual with the power and money of a multinational, who in fact is barely an individual at all—his interests being managed by a system he couldn't dream of keeping track of, which uses false models of himself to show up and shake hands on any number of deals, while the original man himself dreams and plots as a mass of cancerous growths floating in an enormous tank. The Twig equivalent would of course be the Nobles, remnants of an old system that has staked its continued relevance on making its members something more than human.

Contrasted against these inhuman figures of outmoded power is the possibility of a paradigm shift, an emergence of a totally new power and way of being, that can be brought about by a group of highly specialized agents working in tandem. In Gibson's work, this is Wintermute and Neuromancer, the separate specialized AIs which combine together to become an embodiment of the whole of the matrix itself, and to an extent its also the crew of the Straylight Run, the team of carefully selected experts who are able to facilitate the AIs combination. Wildbow brings us this with the lambs, a team of highly specialized beings created out of a project working on the human brain, who we learn at the final hour were engineered to raise themselves above their masters and become something that could break the stagnation of the empire.

This theme of some individual members of the old system in fact being responsible for creating the new power, going through convoluted plans of creating the specialized component beings and waiting for them to ascend and make their creators obsolete, was also present in the Sprawl with Marie-France Tessier and her creation of the Wintermute and Neuromancer AIs.

Alongside these structural and thematic parallels, wildbow obviously put a lot of the characters of the Sprawl into his cast. Molly Millions, the razor girl with knives under her fingertips and a raw excitement at her own ability to kill, is obviously part of the lineage of Mary Coburn. Helen appears to be a direct reimagining of the setting's "vat-grown assassins." The disoriented style of Slick Henry's narration when his bouts of short-term memory loss kick in are a likely influence on Sy's characterization in later arcs. Hell, Johnny Mneumonic's famous "technical boy" spiel that starts the whole Sprawl saga off sounds exactly like the shit Sy'd say:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness. I’d had to turn both those twelve-gauge shells from brass stock, on a lathe, and then load them myself; I’d had to dig up an old microfiche with instructions for hand-loading cartridges; I’d had to build a lever-action press to seat the primers – all very tricky. But I knew they’d work.

Listen to that! That's exactly the type of person who'd never let you forget that he'd gotten called "devastatingly intelligent!" Wildbow took all that and made his horrible boy!

[a-dream-seeking-light]

brandon gobey - debt collectors (2020)

a regional hub for government activity, one of the first buildings to experiment with anti-gravity manipulation.

process stages: 

[zehpeh]

"SUBSISTENCE" - acrylics/ink on watercolour paper, A4 - October 2024 I'll add the physical version of this one to the shop soon - just needs some varnish to bring out the contrast.

[mayanhandballcourt]

Photographer  Mitchell Rouse

[databuffer]

SEVEN from SPRAWL <3 <3 I love her design so much, and this game is like cocomelon shit to me

[bozemane]

Blush Response - SPRAWL_, 2024

[photozoi]

Jeep's interpretation of "sprawl".

Borzoi

[atlurbanist]

Transportation planning tends to over-emphasize the speed & flow of cars while giving crumbs to the needs of pedestrians, cyclists, & transit riders. It's crucial to get a better transportation balance within the existing design of urban streets through redesigns. BUT...

Don't forget to demand better land use as well.

When much of our urbanized space is designed at a scale for cars it's too easy to criticize progressive street redesigns as pie-in-the-sky ideals that "punish" people who live and/or work in these spots. We need to make it so that those criticisms are less easy.

In the short term we should absolutely do what we can to redesign streets for bike/ped safety and transit efficiency. But in the long term, it's essential to retrofit pedestrian-oriented spaces into cities and suburbs for the sake of ensuring comprehensive, equitable access to safer streets in and to mobility options.

[c-53]

THE THING THE SPRAWL SOUNDTRACK DOES WHEN YOU GET THE SHOTGUN IS MAKING ME LOSE MY MIND.

[arsenic-green]

Jack Fusco

[doomspaniels]

Some bug out there is biting us, and Guinevere is getting the worst of it. To help with the agitation of all the itchy bites, she's on Apoquel, hopefully temporarily while we sort out the biting creature.

I think it's helping, what do you think?

[lulzyrobot]

Long overdue group shot of my Sprawl (ttrpg) gang!

Left to Right: Veevee (girl idk your tumblr sorry) , Kassidy (it me), Bas'k (TheSolaranian on Twitter), Domino @jazafras, Dakota @rogueuzu

[jensorensen]

Growing Hypocrisy

Receive my weekly newsletter and help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Also on Patreon.

[brutalgamer]

"Merciless movement shooter" Sprawl arrives on consoles today

Formerly only available via the PC, Rogue Games and developer MAETH’s Sprawl has officially arrived for Xbox Series X|S and PS5.

[vipermenace]

Happy Pride from your local hitman lesbian