detail from the front cover of Night City: A City Sourcebook for Cyberpunk(1991)
“The urban environment is critical to your Cyberpunk world. Whether you use our Night City or create your own, remember that your setting has to have all the right elements. There should be garbage-stewn alleyways. There should be bodies lying in the gutters. There should be wild-eyed lunatics, staggering through pre-dawn streets, muttering darkly and clutching sharp knives. Taxis won’t stop in combat zones. There are firefights at the streetcorner as the local gangs slug it out. Players should find their apartments regularly broken into, their cars vandalized, their property stolen. Crossing town should be like crossing a battlefield, filled with looters, riots, crazies and muggers.
And it always rains. Every day should be grim, gloomy and overcast. The stars never come out. The sun never shines. There are no singing birds, no laughing children. (The last bird died in 2008 ad the kids are grown in vats.) The ozone layer decayed, the greenhouse effect took over, the sky is full of hydrocarbons and the ocean full of sludge. Nice place.*
* Okay, we’re exaggerating. But not much.”
–Cyberpunk 2020: The Roleplaying Game of the Dark Future (Second Edition, 1993)
I’m happy that Europeans are able to recognize school buses as the only truly accessible form of public transport in the US. Most people here don’t even think about it. Our public school bus system is larger than all of the other US public transit systems combined
In September 2004, French police discovered a hidden chamber in the catacombs under Paris. It contained a full-sized movie screen, projection equipment, a bar, a pressure cooker for making couscous, a professionally installed electricity system, and at least three phone lines. Movies ranged from 1950s noir classics to recent thrillers.
When the police returned three days later, the phone and power lines had been cut and there was a note on the floor: “Do not try to find us.” (via)
nO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND THIS ENTIRE CINEMA WAS HIDDEN BEHIND AN UNDER CONSTRUCTION SIGN THAT LEAD TO A CHECK-IN DISK WITH A FULL CCTV HOOKUP THAT WOULD TURN ON AND RECORD ANY UNREGISTERED VISITORS. AND IF SOMEONE SNUCK IN? A TAPE OF BARKING SECURITY DOGS WOULD BEGIN TO PLAY.
BEYOND THE CRAZY FRONT DESK AND THE MOVIE THEATER, THERE WAS A STOCKED BAR AND TABLES AND CHAIRS, MEANING THAT AFTER CATCHING A FLICK IN AN ILLEGAL PARISIAN CATACOMB THEATER, YOU COULD THEN EAT COUSCOUS AND SIP A COCKTAIL NEXT DOOR. THERE WAS A PROFESSIONAL ELECTRICITY SYSTEM SET UP, AND AT LEAST 3 WORKING PHONE LINES. THIS SHIT WAS LIKE A BOND VILLAIN.
BETTER YET? IT WAS RUMORED THAT THE PLACE WAS SET UP BY THE UNDERGROUND FRENCH ART GANG UX “Urban eXperiment”, WHO NAVIGATES THROUGH THE PARISIAN UNDERGROUNDS AND ILLEGALLY RESTORES ABANDONED WORKS OF ART, ALONG WITH HOLDING FILM FESTIVALS IN THE BASEMENTS OF GOVERNMENT BUILDINGS. THEY EVEN RELEASED A SHORT FILM ABOUT THEIR WORK RESTORING THE ICONIC PANTHEON CLOCK OVER THE COURSE OF ONE YEAR. NO ONE SUSPECTED THEIR INVOLVEMENT, UNTIL THE CLOCK BEGAN TO WORK AGAIN AFTER 60 YEARS OF RUSTING.
IF YOU DON’T THINK CATACOMBS AND THE PEOPLE WHO HANG OUT IN THEM ARE SOME OF THE COOLEST FUCKING THINGS IN THE WORLD THEN I IMPLORE YOU TO EAT SOME COUSCOUS AND RECONSIDER.
“Agnes belongs to Old New York, which she is fond of explaining to Marian. Meaning of course, what Ward McAllister called The Four Hundred. The families and members fashionable New York society, made up often of the descendents of the original Dutch and English settlers. The irony of referring to these people as aristocracy lies in the fact that they were not noble at all. They were merchants and farmers and the castaway sons from larger, greater families who came to this country and made their fortunes in the commerce of their time: trade, wool, land, etc. And with their acquired wealth, they bought themselves influence and power, but their greatest claim to nobility was simply that that they had been rich for long enough that people kind of forgot that they’d once been scraggly Dutch farmers.”
— Brandon Taylor
Okay but that applies to all kinds of nobility, always, everywhere. Go far enough back in time, and inevitably there’s an ancestor who acquired property and status he didn’t previously have (typically by committing some horrific act of violence), and then bequeathed it to the next generation. It ain’t New York specific. No one’s ancestors were “noble” since the beginning of time. Someone was simply an especially successful thief / plunderer / exploiter.
The population estimates of the cities of the Roman Empire in 117 AD.
Symbols are proportional to estimated population. After Hanson & Ortman 2017.
Been having fun comparing maps and trying to identify some of the major locations. The big one in Egypt is obviously Alexandria, while the next-biggest is probably Thebes. The large one in Syria I’m sure is Antioch, and the big one in Libya I assume is Leptis Magna.
