http://www.boingboing.net/2010/06/23/china...h-tech-und.html

only thing missing is some guy with a full chrome arm.

wasn't china where that one guy who got his junk lopped off in an accident had a fake one surgically implanted? and it ended up creeping out him and his wife so much that they later removed it? now that's cyberpunk!

I've seen what happens when masses of unemployed young tech heads develop significant density.

I think we may be looking at a potential Chinese hipster explosion of massive proportions.
Perhaps, with that sort of density, their keffiyehs will all get caught together until they form a writhing ball of hipsters known only as the legendary Hipster King...

All pale limbs wiggling in the sun, the individuals only identifiable by the Doc Martens and Converse sticking out of the mass of all-too-hipper-than-thou flesh. A katamari of vague detachment, and with each new hipster pulled in by their "ironic" Christmas Sweater a chorus of voices rise up in an awful din. "Oh, sure:" the doomed wail, an audible smirk echoing off of the city walls, "Interpol's okay, I guess. I mean, personally I was over them once Carlos D. grew that goatee. But I guess some folks still like them. Maybe next you want to check out Block Party? Poseur."

I'm living in Beijing at the moment, and while I can attest to seeing some of the absolute low / street lifestyle stuff, I haven't yet felt like Beijing could be "Shadowrun". It IS a little strange to go from modern-life to absolute destruction / squalor in just a city block. In my last apartment, I lived in what would have been a normal 2-bedroom apartment in the US. But this one had some cheap plywood boards set up as "walls", giving us about 10 tiny "bedrooms". One of these bedrooms had 4 guys in it, all in the tech / computer / graphic design fields. Crazy.

I've heard Shanghai is alot more futuristic-y...will visit soon...

Now Tokyo, in my imagination, is what it's all about, cyperpunk-wise. Maybe because so much cyberpunk fiction is set there (well, the fiction that counts, anyway ).

funny enough i think the GITS movie was set to hong kong.

Yes. Only place to ride a real maglev, too.


Very cyberpunk, Hong Kong. The GitS movie was set in a city built over Tokyo Bay though.

For punk riots under neon-coloured high rises, bioted suits, brutalised cops and hideously aggressive gangs, though, France is the place to go. Seriously, the French are a rough bunch. You walk along the Eiffel Tower during new year's, suspecting no evil, and suddenly find yourself in a riot, have your jacket burning, and then the cops start shooting concussion grenades. You can see black-clad cops beat down some Maghrebian kid in the open, on a metro station (bibliotheque CDG, if you want to know exactly). There also are cavernous, neon-lit catacombs with weird people living in them and more homeless folks than you can shake a stick at. And take the wrong metro and you end up in a place where you feel realy naked wothout a bulletproof vest, passing by shantytowns built in back alleys that make chinese rural villages look like affluent places.

Really, France, I didn't expect you to be like that.

ah, i see how it got things confused. Seems the visual design was based on hong kong but the movie was not set in hong kong.

Yes, visually, it was very Hong Kong, I agree. With a healthy dose of Shanghai.