
I'm not sure of its original source -- and if you know, please let me know -- but someone recently posted to Reddit this handy visual guide at right to the various "punks" of online/gaming/popular culture we talk about a lot on New World Notes, categorized by features and fictional era. (Click to embiggenate.)
Steampunk is surely the most well-known and practiced at the moment, though thanks to Keanu, cyberpunk is seeing a second (or fourth?) resurgence.
Cyberpunk, arguably, is the godfather of them all, since its leaders drove an ironic revival of old science fiction tropes from many previous era, only now seen from an anarchic post-modern point of view -- first starting perhaps with William Gibson/Bruce Sterling's Difference Engine which popularized (pioneered?) steampunk.
Perhaps more interesting are the styles in between steampunk and cyberpunk, since they're less popular:
I guess you could argue that the post-cyberpunk Star Wars films are a kind of raypunk, since the original movies jumped off from the old Buck Rogers movies/comics (the OG raygun genre).
Far as Dieselpunk, I'd say Captain America: The First Avenger qualifies, while the Fallout game series has a lot from Atompunk, such as the ironic Pip Boy iconography. (Or as someone pointed out, Fallout is a Dieselpunk apocalypse built on top of an Atompunk past.)
Meanwhile, the Stranger Things series revels in Cassette Futurism.
(Those are all actually pretty obvious off-the-cuff examples -- I'd love someone to out-geek me with better ones.)
Interesting question for longtime NWN readers: What well-known Second Life experiences fit into these categories?
Gumroad Online Marketplace "Another Peg in Place for the Metaverse"
I mentioned how there's a growing real cash economy for VRChat-based content on Gumroad, an online marketplace for digital content, and reader Joey1058 explored the site deeper, then came back with this brief report:
Quite possibly! In all honesty I didn't know much about the site before this, but it claims that nearly 72,000 creators are selling content on the platform; according to SimilarWeb, Gumroad gets over 12 million monthly visits in recent months, which is quite decent. My pal Leigh Alexander sells her fiction on Gumroad and has this endorsement on the homepage, which is good enough for me.
Also to Joey's point, the content for sale on Gumroad isn't locked to any specific virtual world. (It even has some Second Life-related items for sale.) I don't know if Gumroad will ultimately become the main commerce site for the Metaverse (single or plural), but I think he's right that some kind of independent marketplace like this will be key to making it viable.
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Posted on Monday, October 19, 2020 at 02:00 PM in Comment of the Week, Making the Metaverse, Web Resource | Permalink | Comments (2)
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