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It would be nice to think about cyberpunk utopias, but somehow those just don't grip the popular imagination. Instead it's always overcast or raining, the sky is brocced, corporations own everything and everyone and surveillance is ubiquitous. There's money to be had, but barely enough to buy noodles unless you're connected...or willing to ignore corporate law. Devo Ranks eats the *fancy* noodles every day. They have Skillz. Click for more angles. Hacking into a Public Service Panopticon? CHILD'S PLAY. If you need muscle? Devo Knows A Guy. Or lady, really. Don't worry, Dez! Those cameras are showing nothing but innocuous looped footage now. No one pays the cleaners enough in the cyberpunk dystopian future. I won't pretend to understand what kind of cyber-heist these three are conducting. But you can be sure they have made Powerful Enemies, as well as enough credits to afford the FANCY noodles for the rest of the year! Devo is a fun one. Gender-ambiguous and tech-savvy. Because cyberpunk is inextricable from the late 80s and early 90s, I gave Devo the most day-glo Nickelodeon counterculture wardrobe I could think of. Dez from Bombshell we have seen before, in the post-apocalyptic Radlands, as well as the little sniper from Crooked Dice. The Public Service Panopticonnouncer was made from SD card placeholders and chunks of expired credit card, along with I think a vape component. The text, like much of the signage on the building, comes from a beer can label artfully chopped into pieces and rearranged into vaguely menacing advertisements. Also some sprue and all the camera-looking Bitz and Gunz in my Bitz Box. I don't have any cyberpunk setting or games planned, but I can feel the itch growing. C&C welcome.

I'm not sold on the gameplay, but the tech and potential is interesting.

While shopping in my local Dollar Tree store this week, I noticed these spirograph-like party favors that had some unusual gears in them. I thought I'd do a quick post here just to give folks a heads-up. The gears come in two sizes and you get four in each pack. They looked very naturalistic to me, like something an Elf might carve or create. I'm not sure what I will use these for, but thought they'd be a good thing to have tucked away for just the right project. I think they'd look really cool painted up like wood. I know some of you could probably make use of them for bases, or part of a scenic base. As I look at them, I also realize they might also serve as machinery for some sort of alien or other weird tech.

Hi! I was just wondering if anyone has come across the following issues that I am having when posting & whether anyone can help me please (or let me know if I am simply doing it wrong!). 1. Using the quote "button" to reply to a specific post and thus showing the box of text from the original post in my reply When I try this, my "quote" post just appears as a regular reply post with no original posters text shown. Any thoughts? 2. I would like to add myself to the index of Reaper painted figures post & insert links of my pics to it. Whilst creating a post, I have tried both clicking the link button to add a direct link or typing some appropriate text, selecting it then clicking the link button. The "link" pop up window appears & I copy the URL address into the appropriate text box & click ok but the pop up just stays there forever (the close pop up "x" does not exit the window but you can still type in the text boxes). Eventually, I have to close the browser window to exit the post. I suspect that I am doing something wrong here, can anyone enlighten me please? Also, I want to add links to my signature (future WIP's for example) but I have the same problem here too. I'd much appreciate it if anyone can help or maybe give me some suggestions please. Many thanks!

These are old Ral Partha sculpts from Iron Wind Metals. They are assorted deckers and /or riggers from the Shadowrun game, i.e. people Of The Future who use computers in a virtual matrix and puppet combat drones in the physical world. It occurs to me that decker miniatures are not much called for, since all of their relevant gameplay is in online virtual personas which don't tend to look like people and in an environment where mapping out positions is impossible, so tabletop gameplay with minis is ... a little diffuse, at best. So I wonder how much demand there actually was for figures of the "meat space" physical reality of the deckers, the people who (this is so '90s a vision of the future) carried big physical keyboards in their hands and had to be physically wired into the computer network, including physical implanted wire plugs in their skulls! I love these figures for their outdated vision of future tech. Also they are lovely little sculpts. Anyhow, I have here the elf man from the set 20-572: Elven Deckers - Male & Female; the woman (who turned out to be an elf) from set 20-524: Riggers & Drones (5); the human woman decker from the set 20-501: Deckers (3);and the orc man decker from the set 20-595: Assets Inc. I: Shadowrunners. At the moment I've primed them with Titanium White and washed them with Burnt Umber. The hair is only blocked in so I can do the faces; it will be elaborated later. I am still working on the faces, although I like this first one: Elves are supposed to be a bit full of themselves, so I tried for a haughty look. Speaking of an obsolete vision of the future, this one is wearing cut-off jeans. I'm dissatisfied with this one's face. Fortunately in-game there are prosthetic "Chibi eyes", so I can paint them over weird and claim that's what they are. This guy is full of personality, although you can really see how bizarrely retro the idea of the tech is. Yep, he has to lug that thing around wherever he goes because there's no way a portable computing and communication device could be made, I dunno, pocket sized. As usual, this thread may be sporadic as my painting time is almost random between art projects.

This year my husband got me some resin terrain from Itar's Workshop, including some sci-fi pieces. One of these is IWS-IND-003, "Engine" and one of them is IWS-IND-001, "Power Generator", but I can't recall which is which. Here they are with Reaper's Dee Dee, Astro Girl, for scale. Please pardon my ignorance. I don't know know if these are true-to-life or pure fantasy, so I decided to paint them how I liked. I didn't take pictures for the earliest stages. First I primed them with titanium white (Golden matte fluid acrylics) with a very little flow improver added. Typically I wash over this with burnt umber to bring out details before painting. But for these pieces I wanted elements to glow as if lit from within. I have found that lighting effects work better over a pure white base, so I added them before the umber wash. One of them is going to have a cold, green glow, like fluorescent lights. The other has a shaded violet glow from above. Both have a bit of warm gold light. The mixes are simple. The green was just a touch of phthalocyanine green with titanium white. The violet is the same with the addition of some quinacridone magenta. The yellow is simply yellow iron oxide with white. (Reaper colors = Clear Green (almost), Pure White, Clear Magenta (probably), Palomino Gold) Anything painted on white looks deeper than it is. These colors are pretty light, and to show how light, here's my half-painted Reaper frost giant next to one of the resin pieces. For the last preparation step I washed some burnt umber over the pieces, brushing only lightly over the lighted areas to leave the recesses brightly colored. I may have missed a cranny here or there which I will fix as I go along.

After I saw the DARPA jetpacks and the new mech suits, I figured I'd ask-- what piece of new future tech would you want to own today, if you were given it for free?

This is going to be a fairly awkwardly worded question, because I don't think I really have the vocabulary for it, but.... Does anyone here have any information about safe tablet-browsing practices? By this I mean, with Firefox on my PC, I know to have things like Ghostery, NoScript; etc installed in my browser and then follow it up with a weekly or so hit with Spybot or Malware Bytes; etc to clear up any adware/malware that makes it through my precautions. Is there similar help for tablets? I use a Kindle Fire and my mom uses an iPad, so tips for either/both would be welcome. My parents asked me about it this morning and I had no information to give and wasn't willing to go poking around the internet and getting anonymous and possibly malicious advice.