What does Veeky Forums think of Biopunk? Is it just a hollow aesthetic like steampunk or can it be more?

Making vehicles that possess the ability to get diseases seems like a bad idea.

>Software Viruses

I'm pretty sure the Angel Experiment qualifies as bio-punk, the basic plot is that it's 6 artificially created genetic experiments on the run from the megacorp that created them.

Biopunk is more than aesthetics because the premise raises ethical questions about the morality of modifying life, and the repercussions of doing so. By definition it's already as deep as actual steampunk, and infinitely deeper than cog foppery

shame that that takes the backseat to the "fuck you dad" content of the books.

Biopunk is disgusting and vile. Even if it's conditionally more effective or efficient for some reason, I'd still take the solid beauty of metal and marble.

That's actually usually a really good excuse for Biopunk, since humanities immune system is pretty fucking hyperactive compared to most animals.

Huh. I guess sometimes you CAN judge a book by its cover.

How's Disney's Atlantis biopunk?

Wait. Is this punking against the bio, or punking with the bio?

> save you some time, it's shit

Wouldn't that be Steam Age ClarkePunk?

Wanna explain further?

He may be referring to allergies, which are basically the Immune system reacting to stuff that they don't need to react to. So kinda hyperactive.
But there may be more to his statement than just allergies.

It's an aesthetic, the strength of the story and setting are what matters. You can love an aesthetic, but if it's not written well it's all just pretty pictures.

Are tyranids biopunk ?

This is how I insert conflict whenever I use biopunk. One side sees it as a new way for The Man to control us, the other sees it as freeing and the Antis are The Man trying to limit us.

Can we punk adjacent to the bio?

No but you can punk at right angles against or towards the bio.

Not that user, but humans have a pretty good immune system compared to a lot of animals we deal with on a daily basis, because we've selected for other traits (milk/egg production, floppy ears, etc.). We also have a surprisingly broad base of leukocytes that recognize different viruses, because we cannot stop fucking animals and diseases often hop to us and need to be dealt with.

However, in my favourite bit of bioknowledge, alligator immune systems are absolutely fantastic. So if you want to go beyond vaccines, we need to start making Killer Crocs.

Punk is about rebelling against the status quo and The Man, but I don't quite see how that works with gene engineering which needs large infrastructure. I guess planting hemp seeds in public parks is a type of biopunk?

That's because biopunk isn't a thing. It's a unnecessarily specific sub-subgenre cyberpunk

Depending on how far technology got, there's ways to be a biopunk. For instance, a guy working out of his garage making retroviruses that give minor benefits to people until they run their course, or who operates a nutrient bath system that lets people skip the hospital (and all the associated insurance), who will graft a pair of horns to your dog for the awesome look of it or design an agent that makes bees hyperaggressive so he can release that at an outdoor political rally he disagrees with.

You have to assume that biotech has gone the same way as manufacturing and computer tech (everything miniaturized enough and streamlined enough for autists to tinker with on their own, at least in the small scale), but it's not impossible.

Reverse engineering Monsanto corn to prison break it? Smuggling saplings across the border? Could work.

Your question is inherently flawed.
There IS no "something more", and ALL aesthetics are hollow; be definition it's just a pretty thing to look at. Like the Grand Canyon; sure it's amazing and impressive, but really all it is is a big fucking hole in the ground.
Definition, meaning, and "something more" is provided by context and subtext and actual SUBSTANCE beyond a piece of visual imagery you can look at once and absorb all you'll ever need to know about it.

Despite what the idiot pretentions of Veeky Forums claims, there's nothing inherently wrong with steampunk or ANY kind of punk; there IS something wrong with shitty writers taking a visual aesthetic and then assuming the coolness of the aesthetic will somehow bleed into their shitty writing even though nothing of the sort is true.
There is no "something more" to steampunk or cyberpunk or biopunk or anything else at all because all it is is mostly a visual aesthetic people use for various forms of entertainment, and therefore it's usage and substance depends on the author. Of these ONLY cyberpunk has some extra meaning tacked on (thanks to it's origins in literature), and even what THAT is you'll find a dozen conflicting opinions.

If that's the case, the lines between bio and cyberpunk are really vague. Which isn't necessarily bad, but it means they'd be more of a heavily overlapping Venn diagram than actual clearly defined and discreet genres.

Technically speaking you could do that with all genres at present and almost all the little bubbles wouldn't be more than 2 degrees away from each other and most would be touching a good amount of others.

Honestly I don't think I could ever find a use for this sort of... theme.
It just seems very messy.

>and ALL aesthetics are hollow; be definition it's just a pretty thing to look at. Like the Grand Canyon; sure it's amazing and impressive, but really all it is is a big fucking hole in the ground.
Except when aesthetics are used to express thing beyond appearance, through appearance. And the Grand Canyon is a geological treasure of enormous importance for the field, which of itself is of enormous importance.

I like how Half-Life 2 handled it

youtube.com/watch?v=MvBo_rKleNw

SOON

Meh. I like biotech but not the stuff that's just an animal turned into some sort of vehicle or with a bunch of guns strapped to it. It either just looks dumb or just straight up cruel to the point that no one but a tyrannic race of psychopathic aliens could think it was a good idea. Machines that look like animals are neat though.

I like it better when it's more dealing with colonies of single celled stuff that you're influencing to fulfill roles you want it too. Symbiotes and battle parasites and stuff like that. So naturally occurring grey goo with a wider color pallet is what I'm into I suppose.

Currently working on a biopunk sci-fi setting.

How far do you think I should let computers go? I want to have tech be more bio-based than circuit-based (no cybernetics but everyone bioaugments and genemods their body, ships have massive internal brains that handle all the calculations, etc.) but I don't know when to diverge the timelines.

I wouldn't mind people having smart-phone equivalents, I just think that by the time transistors develop to that level it's going doing down an irrevocable path. Maybe have the split at Dolly the Sheep, where everyone decides to fund biotech for... reasons?

...

Well there's the tech "wall" silicon valley fears. Basically when we just plain can't miniaturize or optimize anymore. The claim is somewhere between 20-60 years from now and failing some MASSIVE breakthrough all we can do beyond that point is making headway in mass production and maintenance. Obviously quantum computers will have an impact but the best estimate is around a century from now for actually effective computing in a normal sized package and thats assuming we make several break throughs in the interim.
Assuming we hit this wall full force biomechanics could be a feasible way around it as brains are surprisingly scary at information storage and the more we look at it the more it seems like a pseudo-form of quantum computing. We're even now looking into crazy shit like how our eyes self lubricate and how that could be used in literally any machine by farming nerves that do the same job in our eyes via sensing dryness and undue friction. We're also looking into animals with cells that produce electricity which in theory could make powerplants that eat organic waste and shove out electricity. Hell we've already achieved algae that produce fuel that unmodified cars can use and all we need is a way to compact it and make it happen a few hundred times faster. The cartilage in our knees function damn near frictionlessly which would revolutionize any machinery that moves.
I guess what I'm saying is the cut off for tech not beatig organic components was about 3 decades ago and as demand and innovation happens we shove in organic bits where and when applicable.

Pic reminded me of this

Or this

Maybe too on the nose, but I could see a Zika virus like pandemic or Children of Men like scenario resulting in a massive rush to invest in biotech for cures/alternate reproductive methods which then evolves into an international or capitalistic arms race for better and more extreme genetic alteration.

>Punk is about rebelling against the status quo and The Man, but I don't quite see how that works with gene engineering which needs large infrastructure.
You need to divorce your mind from the outdated idea that a "-punk" setting requires rebellion against authority. We're all aware that cyberpunk is the genre that started the trend, and that cyberpunk's "thing" was rebelling against the man, but the inherent meaning of the "-punk" suffix has changed over the years to be a simple descriptor rider.

While most people seem to have come to terms with this fact, there will probably be a couple of angry replies to this telling me that "-punk" isn't a placeholder for "prevalent element in this setting".

Pic related; it's the biopunk equivalent of a pink mohawk

Well we're currently opening the door for the last bit as america screwed itself recently on genetics saying its immoral grounds and won't even touch it where shitstain china just said "throw money at us and we'll work on it" so people fucking did and now we're waiting to see if they actually can make supersoldiers and if they'll survive the publicity of the corpses of failures.

>there's ways to be a biopunk

You mean like that one guy who reverse engineered his friends' poo and did kooky stuff with stomach bacteria to unfuck his digestive system by making pills out of that gunk?

tl;dr experimental probiotics

I'm surprised these haven't been posted yet, as this is objectively the best biopunk setting.

Not much of an aesthetic. It's more of a specific view of the future, and it's hard to really say much for it because it's not limited per se.
>Can it be more?
Sure. If you're interested in the question of Humanity proper, biological alteration is less established and more viscerally grotesque than bionics for the purposes of making people actually think about the question. And it results in a different set of near-future situations than more established things do. To me, it seems like the value in it is in the Giger look of it-- It's uncomfortable in a way that's artful. But if you intend to do the same with just written descriptions, you'll need to be a lot more clever with how you bend people's comfort zones.

>a dozen conflicting opinions
You may be underselling that a bit. Has anybody here seen two people agree on what the meaning of Cyberpunk is?

The entirety of "punk" is the rejection of polite society and authority.

What you are describing is "dress up".

"We forgot solar panels exist: The novel"

"Dress up" describes most of what gets the -punk suffix. What happened to cyberpunk is that it became common enough, and obtained a genre following on its own to an extent that you could identify the visual markers of it more quickly than you could identify the genre elements underneath that-- Which led to works that bit on the visual elements (for valid or invalid reasons) without really worrying about other defining elements of the literature. Then The Difference Engine sparked Steampunk, which was named because the kind of worldbuilding and description that had become fairly known as an indicator of cyberpunk was shifted onto this newer fad genre, and the 'steampunk' name was chosen to describe that, and then every other -punk anything tagged on from that convention.

Just the words that comprise the names of these genres can't really be a criterion, since the words have been used half-assed and inconsistently from everybody between content creators, publishers, fans, short-lived countercultures, and so on. It just misses too much context to be sufficient.

B-b-but these springs are more efficient! And we need that land for food not solar panels!

I read The Water Knife by this guy, it was fairly compelling. Felt like it lost momentum as time went on, and the ending really failed to live up to the tone it'd cast up to that point. But that didn't ruin the whole thing for me.

Thanks. I don't know if that's where I'll make the break (I've already rewritten the setting a couple of times as the rules change) but that stuff like eyeball lubrication and cartilage is definitely making it in there.

An arms race is going to be part of it, but I personally don't like the "pandemic" explanation - it always feels kinda lazy to me, like the writer said, "I don't know how to get from point A to point B, so I'm just going to throw everything up in the air and only catch what I want to keep."

I'd punk her bio, if ya knowhaddimean.

From reading them when I was twelve, from what I can remember, The first three were pretty good, if a bit edgy OTT in retrospect. But even when I was twelve I knew full well it should have ended at book three, instead they kept going, with the kids going to Antarctica to save the penguins, and sitting around doing pointless relationship drama.
Decent concept, terrible execution.

Regarding the arms race bit, I can see where that other user is coming from. Suppose Zika becomes an even more massive problem than it is, and then suppose that some bright labcoat somewhere gets the idea to use modified CRISPR technology to engineer unique leukocytes specifically to target/entrap Zika.

If we play off the idea that the world had to funnel ludicrous amounts of funds into the technology and infrastructure to make these advancements, you've basically set the stage for a biotechnology revolution, so long as someone in-setting has the foresight to repurpose the infrastructure for generic experimentation and production.

oh boy this changed a lot since the last video I saw

Watch this nagas: youtube.com/watch?v=CVa_IZVzUoc

>ctrl-f Twig
>no results
Veeky Forums i am disappoint. i'm betting the baron was using those children's brains for some kind of biotech computer - given that mental augmentations are mostly absent in setting so far for everybody but lambs like sy and jamie or top-tier nobles like the Duke or Infanta and wildbow's Boil snip had a back-alley thinking machine.

no, more along the lines of the atlantians tech. They had flying fish that were pretty cool.

Those were stone powered by magitech, not organic.

youtube.com/watch?v=i8kf5HNIgwg

>Is it just a hollow aesthetic like steampunk or can it be more?
Anything with the -punk suffix is just hollow aesthetic.

...

Tyranids and H.R. Giger are what I think of when I think of biopunk. Everything is organic, grown and evolved. No metals, no electricity, all blood and flesh and carapace. Flesh sculpted and moulded as it grows to form structures of all sorts and kinds. Omnipresent genitalia is optional.

Biopunk is great for aliens, for humans it seems a little too, well, alien.

Honestly, to do full-on biopunk right 'human' needs to be an arbitrary distinction. You can tinge things with modifications and get on the road of strange, but it's not pure biopunk, imo.

Or, you know, nuclear power.

I still enjoyed the resource-scarcity aesthetics.

Yeah, this was a thing in the late 90s a la Lexx, Farscape bunch of other stuff. Also like 1/4 of all anime. Not exactly original. I don't think it's a very original aesthetic. Has no sense of time.

I think it can be something more.

Oh great, another phrase with -punk at the end. Are people dressing up as fucking dolphins with goggles yet?

Why not both? China Mievelle's Bas-Lag novels have "punishment factories", where instead of locking criminals up they will alter them, adding limbs or taking away parts to make them rejects of society (for example: a whistleblower for government corruption had his mouth removed) - while others are combined with machines for the purpose of slave labor.

>hating anything -punk
Faggot. I bet you hate Stonepunk, too.

So Magic cards are biopunk now?

Yeah, none of that is new.

Say what you want, at least steampunk and cyberpunk had an aesthetic, the former from Jules Verne revivalists and an alternate future in the present, the latter from Gibson et al . All this other stuff is marketing crap.

Phyrexia has always been a biopunk setting.

Don't give the publishing houses any ideas. They'll probably give you a 3 book deal if you tell them about your exciting stonepunk series, which is in no way related to the Flintstones.

Dinotopia actually did this, more or less. It actually was pretty good.

CRISPER/Cas9 is going to be the tool that shapes the biotech revolution

>punk
>A collective of bio-mechanical horrors looking to assimilate all planes into their collective

the term punk is cancer.

...

Phyrexia is the "big corp" that hogs all knowledge of Bioengineering and thrives upon it, and those that rebel against the assimilation are the punks.
A bit far fetched but whatevs

The bit that makes our joints nearly friction-less is the synovial fluid and how it interacts with healthy bone/cartilage. I'd give you more detail, but it's been a couple years since my last tissue engineering class (I have my degree in Biomedical Engineering).

It is amazing, but, it's also hard to achieve synthetically. Your best bet is to either have a sealed compartment with hardened graphene walls operating at a near vacuum. OR, Some sort of sealed compartment filled with an inert noble gas like Argon. At a certain point, smoothness of surfaces and fluidity of interstitial material stops being effective and you have to worry about limitations of the molecular structure of the involved components. Synovial fluid is great, but it's mostly water and won't interact the same way in a different setting.

yeah crazy, except thats pretty much how patents work

I forgot they made the black chick a monkey.

Chemical computers and wetware/neurcomputers already exist. Google is your friend.

Have you studied ALife (Artifical Life) at all?

A bunch of hippie fgts devoted their lives to misunderstanding how energy works and making it nearly fucking impossible to build a nuke plant. Virtually all our power comes from coal.

Yeah, not that guy. But I stumbled upon this video not too long ago.
youtube.com/watch?v=xcHcNyC6O84
Pretty interesting stuff coming up in the next 20-ish years I hope.

>waaah the meanings of words change over time waaaaah
This is you.

The few nuclear plants in the world still provide for about 10% of the world's energy

They're also by far the biggest power source in France

>modified CRISPR technology to engineer unique leukocytes specifically to target/entrap Zika

Nah, the original plan for now is to erradicate Aedes aegypti for good using bioengineered samples of the same species.

who.int/emergencies/zika-virus/articles/mosquito-control/en

Nope. Sorry friend, mostly just medical devices, tissue engineering, prosthesis, genetic/epigenetic research, etc. Most programs have to due with stuff that will be profitable/usable within the next 25 years (as that's how long a medical patent can last). Even the simple stuff (like what I just mentioned) is insanely hard to nail down and operate consistently. Investors won't give you money unless you can guarantee return and that can only result from something that is fairly provable and can pass the insane regulatory environment in the U.S. (that's actually why things cost so much)

TL;DR: Nah, you can't make money off of that and won't be able to within the near future. I'll leave that stuff to DARPA.

tl; dr Your guy is an idiot and doesn't understand basic math.

I don't think you actually understand what this is. This is operating like GPGPU parallelization. It may use less electricity, I'd have to review it carefully, which I have no intention of doing, but I see no indication it's any faster. It may actually be slower. The author of the paper doesn't actually seem to understand Big O notation. It doesn't dodge super-polynomial time required to solve NP complete subset problems either, that's just bullshit.

Read the journal article next time, this is not really anything of note. Extensive parallelization is not used very often for reasons I won't get into in any detail. Short version is it's very hard to program for and GPU cores aren't as complex as CPU cores.

If you want further details, someone did apparently refute the thing, presumably for the same reasons I listed, but probably more politely.