Mona Lisa Overpod

• MLOP 23: Pluto (2023)

  Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in '80s and they break down its themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today!Japanese manga, American comics, anime and western cartoons all owe an unpayable debt to Osamu Tezuka and his greatest creation Astro Boy. Astro (or Atom's) adventures were brisk and often silly, but they would subtly comment on more adult topics like discrimination, war, and moral ambiguity. Naoki Urasawa is mangaka who was heavily inspired by Tezuka's work, and in 2003 he released Pluto, an eight-volume mini-series that that took a deeper, darker look at the world of Astro Boy. When both humans and robots are being murdered by a shadowy killer, robot cop Gesicht will need to assemble the pieces of the mystery, as the potential victims try to reassemble their war-torn and shattered lives. In this episode, we discuss how both Tezuka's and Urasawa's styles reflect their respective eras, compare modern western comics and gekiga, lying as a signifier of sentience, the manga's restaging of the 2003 Iraq war and its depiction of PTSD and survivor's guilt. the families built by both humans and robots in the story, the subtle apartheid present in Astro's world, robots as people as commodities, Asimov's laws as guidleines and not rules, and becoming just "human" enough to kill. We also talk about fresh Shrimp Jesus, larcenous typography, Will Prompt Engineer For Food, being lodged in the canon, hitting on the robot nose, no Aibo left behind, The Killing of a Rest Stop Robot, dating your Roomba, machine gun butts, and the REAL reason Pluto has horns!Hurt robots hurt robots.The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now!https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/Read the saga of the "Download a Car" font!https://www.404media.co/tag/xband/Join Kaliban on Twitch weekdays at 12pm for the Cyber Lunch Hour!http://twitch.tv/justenoughtropePut Just Enough Trope merch on your body!http://justenoughtrope.threadless.comMLOP is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/monalisaoverpodhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttp://www.instagram.com/monalisaoverpodhttps://discord.gg/7E6wUayqBuy us a coffee on Ko-Fi!https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope

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  1:34:07
• MLOP 22: Hackers (1995)

  Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in '80s and they break down its themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today!With the explosion of technology-related media and the ubiquity of personal data devices in the 21st century, it's hard to remember the great fear and trepidation that accompanied the early appearance of the personal computer. For years, our industrial world was concrete and legible...and suddenly you were getting paid by computer and you could order a pizza on the internet. The technopriests of the early Digital Age were the hackers, feared and admired equally for their mastery of the archane pathways that now ruled our daily lives. But were they nefarious brigands who sought to steal your wealth and erase your identity. Or did they just want to rollerblade, man? In this episode, we discuss how 1995's Hackers arrived both too late for the heyday of the demonization of phreakers and code kids and too early to be appreciated for its impressively insightful look at the quickly accelerating pace of late 20th century technosocial advancement. The crime of curiosity was no crime at all for young and savvy hackers who just wanted to understand the foundations of our new technological edifices, and what better guides than Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie? We also talk about relapsing on Star Trek, sulfur credits, keyword: Paradise, hackers as protagonists, going through all the thresholds, 1995 as hacker cinema year zero, evolving from nerd to style icon, DOS war stories, Operation Sun Devil, payphone selfies, the SWAT team in your neighborhood, doing a Superman III, the fabled Hackers 2, and the Phantom Phreak!We're HERE for the rollerblading!The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now!https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/Join Kaliban on Twitch weekdays at 12pm for the Cyber Lunch Hour!http://twitch.tv/justenoughtropePut Just Enough Trope merch on your body!http://justenoughtrope.threadless.comMLOP is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/monalisaoverpodhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttp://www.instagram.com/monalisaoverpodhttps://discord.gg/7E6wUayqBuy us a coffee on Ko-Fi!https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope

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  1:53:40
• MLOP 21: BLAME!

  Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in '80s and they break down its themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today!Does cyberpunk storytelling require dialogue and exposition? Even more than mainstream sci-fi, the cyberpunk genre has complicated concepts and themes it needs to communicate to the reader. But Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! defies convention with a taciturn protagonist and a silent world. An architect by training and a mangaka by trade, Nihei lets his intricate and somber illustrations drive the story of a lone wanderer in an impossibly gargantuan and hostile space.  In this episode, we discuss how the influences that shaped Nihei's work, the somber mood created by his detailed landscapes, the manga's liminal spaces, the story's unconscious criticism of conspicuous consumption, what defines a neo-cyberpunk tale, and the permeable boundaries of transhumanism. We also talk about gettin' Biblical, "worm-infected birds", the horse snack gap, Making BLAME! Great Again, adding more shoe leather, nemotopia, OMG poststructuralism, projected negativity, original flavor DNA, Wesley and the Drug Planet, coelacanths, treks and silence, and taking a trippy-trip through a strange land!YOU GOT BLAMED!The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now!https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/Join Kaliban on Twitch weekdays at 12pm for the Cyber Lunch Hour!http://twitch.tv/justenoughtropePut Just Enough Trope merch on your body!http://justenoughtrope.threadless.comMLOP is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/monalisaoverpodhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttp://www.instagram.com/monalisaoverpodhttps://discord.gg/7E6wUayqBuy us a coffee on Ko-Fi!https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope

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  1:54:19
• MLOP 20: Snow Crash

  Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in '80s and they break down its themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today!Was Snow Crash the annunciation of a new era of the cyberpunk genre or its epitaph? Upon its release in 1992, Neal Stephenson's third novel entered a literary world that had grown tired of the pessimistic speculations of tech noir fiction. The public was ready for tales of a future that promised hope and adventure, a little "high life" to go with the "high tech". Snow Crash has been lauded by contemporary critics (and tech CEOs) as a visionary, biting satire of consumerism and cyberpunk tropes in equal measure. But is Stephenson's tale of pizza-delivering hackers a postcyberpunk, postmodernist masterpiece, or is it just a bunch of babble? In this episode, we discuss the environment into which Snow Crash was born, its comic origins, the contiguity of cyberpunk and satire, Stephenson's evolving career, postcyberpunk, the book's eerie prescience, civilization as a virus, the book's influence on our current world, and a "culture medium for a medium culture." We also talk about the Seattle of the Midwest, missing the "meme", baby luaus, doing your own research, repeating bad information, A Irony, Ed Meece bucks, commentainment, status symbol books, boomer hackers and zoomer slackers, hipster sword fights, loving a crapsack world, subverting the "punk", notes of libertarianism, "Sushi K, Tran, and the Rat Things: The Spinoff", AskJeeves+, Wikipedia OMEGA, "skipping the memo", and only reading the second part of Snow Crash?!I love Y.T.! uh...like a little sister...The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now!https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/Join Kaliban on Twitch weekdays at 12pm for the Cyber Lunch Hour!http://twitch.tv/justenoughtropePut Just Enough Trope merch on your body!http://justenoughtrope.threadless.comMLOP is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/monalisaoverpodhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttp://www.instagram.com/monalisaoverpodhttps://discord.gg/7E6wUayqBuy us a coffee on Ko-Fi!https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope

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  1:54:12
• MLOP 19: Bubblegum Crisis

  Welcome to Mona Lisa Overpod, the show that asks the question "What is cyberpunk?" On each episode, hosts Ka1iban and author Lyda Morehouse dive into the genre that helped define sci-fi fiction in '80s and they break down its themes which remain relevant to our lives in the 21st century. Pull on your mirrorshades, jack into the matrix, and start your run with us today!Cyberpunk is not solely an American phenomenon, and even as Western works like Blade Runner and Neuromancer were releasing in the 1980s, Japan was already well on its way to becoming a wellspring of high-tech-low-life science fiction. Part Charlie's Angels, part Iron Man, and all attitude, Bubblegum Crisis exploded onto Japanese screens in 1987 to smash the glass ceiling of female representation in bad ass anime. Squealing tires and squealing guitars provide the soundtrack to this techno-thriller that prefigures the direction anime and Western animation would take for the next two decades. In this episode, we discuss how Bubblegum Crisis came to be and why it may never be again, the cross-pollination that informed the development of cyberpunk on both sides of the Pacific, the economic conditions in Showa Japan that created the OVA boom and modern anime, putting female characters front-and-center, and the unique Japanese flavor of cyberpunk media. We also talk about ChatGPT drinking all our water, Top Gun maps, Chris Nolan: Anime Fan, getting your ball back, Lupin the Murderer, distilling liquid 1987, feminism blankets, missing the yaoi, an exoskeleton for your exoskeleton, Grimace Hulk, and it's not anime...it's HBO!THE BABY SITUATION IS BAD!The new edition of Lyda's book, Ressurection Code, is out now!https://wizardstowerpress.com/books-2/books-by-lyda-morehouse/resurrection-code/Join Kaliban on Twitch weekdays at 12pm for the Cyber Lunch Hour!http://twitch.tv/justenoughtropePut Just Enough Trope merch on your body!http://justenoughtrope.threadless.comMLOP is a part of the Just Enough Trope podcast network. Check out our other shows about your favorite pop culture topics and join our Discord!http://www.twitter.com/monalisaoverpodhttp://www.justenoughtrope.comhttp://www.instagram.com/monalisaoverpodhttps://discord.gg/7E6wUayqBuy us a coffee on Ko-Fi!https://ko-fi.com/justenoughtrope

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  1:34:59

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