Downloading now. I heard it when MrsK played it this morning and thought it was brilliant, now I want to see it.

Really enjoyed it, TM. If I can help with anything, just let me know.

best,
Chris H

Thanks all for the kind words and support.

A couple things you can do is send the video to your friends and tell them to check out the website. Also, I'm trying to figure out how some good ways to get together a regular community to talk about ideas and collaborate and such, put together a mailing list to keep people updated. So if you have any or can help with that, that would be great.

All Tomorrow's Neuromancers Episode 1: Cyber Community organizing

All Tomorrow's Neuromancer's site

Forum

Wow man. You're getting my vote.

Twilite Minotaur for President of the United Intarnet!

Lolkahns!

I love it, hun.

Also, has anyone used Google Groups? Is that a good platform for collaborations and such? I'd like to be able to get an online shared workspace where pictures, audio, video, scripts can be uploaded and downloaded and such.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

So, in order to set up a workspace and community space for the project, I made an All Tomorrow's Neuromancers Group at Google Groups. We can throw whatever files and stuff up there and I think it will make for easy collaboration.

Preach it brother!!!

(sorry it took a couple of days to watch - needed to find a fatter pipe)

I only have one question: when your obvious talent gets you swept up by a major studio, is this wonderful anti-corp rant going to be slightly embarrassing?

Thanks baby!

quote:

Originally posted by Bravus:
Preach it brother!!!

(sorry it took a couple of days to watch - needed to find a fatter pipe)

I only have one question: when your obvious talent gets you swept up by a major studio, is this wonderful anti-corp rant going to be slightly embarrassing?

I provoked, but I didn't inhale.

Dude, that was most excellent!

Seriously.
You, TM, rock.

Thanks Arkan, it means a lot coming from ya!

Right now I'm working on the next episode, going to be using some of Meru's sweet music in the mix.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: TwiliteMinotaur,

TwiliteMinotaur, I watched your video. You rock !!!

Congrats !!!

Fanks, cb4!

Next episode script, workin' progress:

Neurofinancer

In the grip of a recurring dream, Jayce saw the neon unfolding origami trick reveals it's coming shape, creasing and folding, a paper airplane. Smoke billowing from two towers, parachutes the color of Visa cards, woven of strands of fine print, and tricks more subtle still. From the black hearts of square pyramids, giant squid burst forth, escape the raging mob in a cloud of shadow economics and apocalypse babble. Squid whose tentacles strangle his mother, tear her from the IV in her hospital bed, rip her worthless home off its worthless foundation. They eat her alive as he stands there, doing nothing. Willing his feet to move, his hands to reach out, his vocal chords to scream 'no', her name, something, anything. But his body remains silent. "Eat me, you fuckers!" Ignoring even his attempts to cry.

A neon city on fire, a world shut off from the world. Snake Pilskin manifests, crawling out of Lady Liberty's empty eye socket. "This is your boom stick, Jayce."

"What do I do with it?"

"One of them tries to eat you? You stick it in their mouth, pull the trigger."

***

Jayce glanced at the red and blue lines of stock and credit markets scrambling like erratic Richter scales on the edge of his heads-up display, tectonic and dire. Surging out of the Myspace sprawl, he could see the silhouette of Wall Street clearly now. Black corporate towers overshadowed by the monstrously inflated pyramids of AIG, Bear Sterns, JP Morgan,
Fannie Mae, Freddy Mac, Goldman Sachs, taxpayer money gushing in through the hypodermic needles of bailouts like so much heroine as the leviathans shuddered in withdrawal. Below, the mushroom-dust cloud of the Lehman Brothers data structure spreading through the streets, eating money market funds and stifling bystanders in a fog of fraudulent data. Every structure shrouded in miles of ICE, the structures themselves black as an abyss in space, no light escaping, no light reaching the shadow financing within. Cash flow pipelines slithering out from the great black heart of America's financial system, silently sucking on the oblivious population.

ECONOMIC CRISIS! ARMAGEDDON AT HAND! "The fire on Wall Street is going to spread to Main Street if we don't join as one nation and pass this bill. Whether you can stay in your home, pay for your child's college, get health care, even get groceries will be endangered if we don't come together right now and act." The zeppelins of CNN and Fox News in patriotic neon circling the skies like great vultures. Presidential candidates and talking heads declared their bipartisan leadership in time of crisis with one hand as they tossed mud with the other in meaningless soundbytes, cut to lipstick drama.

The scene on the ground was a dystopic sci-fi cult film if low-budget CGI had been around in the early 80's. The streets were flooded with raging avatars, cyber riots had started to break out, cars set on fire with open-source animations, the cheap ray-tracing algorithms bathing the angry faces of the mob with flickering red light the color of discount fake blood. Screams and cries rained in from all directions. "Fuck the fat cats!" "Just say NO to 'No Banker Left Behind'!" "Eat my debt!" "Last time I believed you I lost my left nut in Iraq. Well you can suck my right!"

"Impeach the financial terrorists!"

"Shit, man, this looks seriously heavy. Like 28 Days Later or something. What the fuck is going on?"

"What's been going on for the last few decades or so, only more apparent now. Just keep our eyes open, it's gonna get dark real soon."

As they neared the outer gate to Wall Street, the Chinese soft transformed their mask into the former CEO of a recently crashed major insurance company, looking to re-invest his multi-million 'goodbye' bonuses. The guard, an FBI avatar complete with bone mic, let them through with a smile that should've come with an orderv.

***

"Mama, we need to talk about the house. You're barely meeting the mortgage payments now and it's only going to go up, we've got to look at options."

"Oh don't worry your sweet little head about that now baby. We're Americans. We put a man on the moon, beat the Russians, we're God's free people. Go on try a slice of mama's apple pie, it's a new recipe I picked up from The View, it'll have you feelin' right in no time, make you forget all these numbers nonsense."

"Mama, listen to me..."

"Now don't forget to pick up Janie from soccer practice, I got a doctor's appointment this afternoon. They want to take another one of those MRI things where you go in that little space ship and make all these growly rumbly noises, say they want another look at something. Should've eaten my apples I guess. Oh, that reminds me, do you think I could borrow some money for groceries, Jayce? You wouldn't believe the prices their charging nowadays..."

***

Passing into the Wall Street inner sanctum, also known as "Firewall Street", Jayce could've sworn he felt a real cold wash over him. The virtual light of blogosphere colonies behind them at last faded on the horizon as they entered the chasm between two towers. He could make out nothing but darkness, save the digitally engraved signs and heavily guarded gateways, but he felt the ever vigilant stare of defensive AI, lurking somewhere behind one way mirrors.

"Where the hell is everyone? Is this a rich asshole field trip day?"

"No, it's quite a busy day on Wall Street. Look."

With concentration, one could see that the fabric of cyberspacetime appeared to be rippling, as though projected onto a canvas in a light wind. Looking closer, discrete entities and streams of information could be discerned passing between the towers, although ultimately unidentifiable.

"Credit default swaps. Derivatives. Unfettered leverage. Insiders."

"Shit. I don't know what the hell that is, but it sounds pretty bad."

"$1,200 trillion in financial turnover per year. Twelve Hundred Trillion. Talk about headfucks, huh? Twelve times the GDP of the fucking world. If you could reach your hand out there and grab just one minute's worth of the money flying around, you could provide health care to every American, get the US off of foreign oil in ten years, and rebuild the majority of the infrastructure in the country. But instead it just goes to buying more houses for people with too many of them. Ultimately it's $44,000 stolen from the pocket of every citizen, every year, to go to the top 0.1% bluest of bloods."

"Wow, that's fuckin' crazy, man. You're sure this is gonna work, right?"

"Sure enough. It's just a heist job: get in, grab some credit, get out. Stealing from the rich. Our employer got us into Google, remember. And we need this, Max. It's reasonable, calculable risk." Jayce saw his mortgage payments and his mother's medical bills skyrocketing in his minds eye.

"Oh my god, Jayce, this has to be bullshit, CNN is saying Washington has just been hit by a DDOS attack and a dirty bomb."

"The fuck." Jayce popped up a window to the live feed.

"Shortly after Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's announcement this morning that she was confident the $700 billion dollar bailout had more than enough support to pass this time, Washington DC was simultaneously hit by a radiological dispersal device, or dirty bomb, and a devastating cyber attack that has all communications in the DC area shut down. Experts are sayiing the attack was 'unmistakably coordinated' in order to prevent the vote on the bill from taking place..."

"This is looking seriously fucked up, but we've got to finish the job. All right, we're coming up on it. Let's turn the bullshit box up to a level fit for the American economy."

On their descent to the gateway of the Goldman Sachs tower, their avatar underwent another metamorphosis. Young hotshot-hair thinned to just a grey snapfrost ring from temple to temple, a pair of rimless spectacles snapping in place. The long, hawkish face pulled into a smile, offering credentials for US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson to the automated guard at the entrance to the Goldman Sachs building.

"Holy deregulations, Batman, we're Mr. Hanky Panky Paulson himself! I saw him on Leno the other night. He's the... Secretary of the Treasures or something right? In charge of the US finances."

"Yeah. And oh, it gets better. 'Secretary Paulson' is here to 'oversee' the $700 billion bail out of Goldman Sachs, the very bank that he was CEO of until his appointment by Bush as Treasury Secretary."

The guard's Hal-like eye glowed green, reinforced doors sliding open as it rolled aside.
"Welcome back, Mr. Paulson. It has been twenty two hours since your last visit to Goldman Sachs."
Jayce exhaled. Already, they had gotten further than any regulatory entity had been in years, thanks to the chainsawing of market regulations by congress during the Bush reign, and Paulson sitting on his hands throughout the sub-prime mortgage crisis to the present one.

Max punched them forward, smooth and calm, even the gait and tie adjustments of an uber-suit rendered with world-class effects-house precision. Ambient effects reverberated footsteps Cathedral-like down the cyclopean hall, polished real wood floor rendered to the last millimeter of grain that Jayce wished he could steal for his overpriced prefab shit hole. Gold-ensconced portraits of wrinkly pink faces lined the throne room, a long procession of bastardhood feudalism. And at the far end, the avuncular smile of the grandfather of trickledown himself, Milton Friedman, supported by the great eagle of the United States federal government.

"How we doin', Max?"

"We're absent as the middle class from a Republican speech. Our Shanghai ride is prepped and ready for launch in nine, eight, seven, six..."

"Let's just pray the Chinese make their viruses better than they make their milk powder."

"Two, hold on to your illiquid assets--"

Vision blurred, Friedman's neck elongated and then decapitated as the attack program blasted them forward, blowing the reception screen apart, shards of eagle and suit raining inward.

"Christ," Jayce winced, grabbing the pilot's joystick which appeared between his legs. The Chinese program soared high over the Goldman Sachs cores below.

Derivatives are very complex contracts, and the amount of computer power and management time needed to attempt to handle them is staggering. In 1983, modeling the payout on a simple three-tranche CMO took a mainframe computer a whole weekend. The price tag to even begin to hope to handle derivatives puts all but the very biggest investment and commercial banks with hundreds of billions in assets out of the game.

Jayce could not begin to fathom the computing power required to run the neon cityscape of data below. No, it wasn't a cityscape. The most deranged postmodernist's nightmare would scream in numerological terror from a glance at the swarming eldritch hell hole. No, only truly demented economists could have dreamt up such a thing. If life had evolved in a truly cold, chaotic, deregulated, meaningless universe run by insane mathematical equations, this was the nameless entity it would have produced. Jayce banked and swerved frantically, dodging the monstrous black tentacles of 900 to 1 leverage that swept the burning crimson skies of the housing market, reaching for greater and greater swaths of bad mortgage packages to further magnify gains, securitize and sell to foreign investors to swell its belly. What might have once been a neatly regulated city grid of financing for actual businesses, people trying to buy a house or go to college had exploded into a festering Gigerian hive of mad gambling in credit default swaps and truly absurd derivative numbers games of unthinkable complexity, fueling the thing's constant inflation.

"Jesus... Jayce, I can't get a reading on anything, it's a complete zoo in here, where are we-"

"We've got to go down into the heart of this fucker, Max, it's our only chance. Punch us down now before it gets on to us."

"You're crazy man-"

"NOW!"

And as waves of shadow closed in from all sides, dark and dire as the blotch of a tumor in an MRI, the nose of their ship pointed down into the gaping maw of an abyss into which so many mortgages, taxpayers, the middle class, the country, his aimless life, his sick mother were falling, he discovered, in the black eye of all that shadow, a sudden singularity of purpose. A moment of clarity. He was a $700 billion dollar boomstick. A promissory paper airplane, one that could fly into the tower of the royalty, the financial terrorists themselves, tear down the final wall and light up Wall Street for all to see.

"Eat me, mother fuckers!"

Jayce dove, hard, into the eye of the Great American Lie.

Jayce's sensorineural simulation warped with the distortion of the manipulated "free" market.
His mouth filled with aching taste of bullshit.
His eyes were humming lattices of debt, sliced and packaged, like prefab real estate, into frames.
Each frame multiplied into a hall of mirrors. Pictures of pictures of houses, an infinite recursion of bad mortgage deals, upon illegal deals, upon completely imaginary deals between colossal financial entities. At each iteration of transaction sprouted oily roots, hungry for the taste of inflated bullshit, sucking out a percentage from the real economy. Then the halls of his eyes split, branched out into whole separate histories of houses. The hourglass of perception of spacetime bent, then finally detonated into a quantum sandstorm of global financial activity, multiplied, divided, exponentiated, derivatived into a swarming cosmic labyrinth of numerical convolution. Until at last, like a face in clouds, his consciousness coalesced into that $1,200 trillion fabricated sand castle, dozens of times the size of all the wealth of the world itself, threatening to burst through the null sky of the very simulation, a structure built upon clouds of toxic, obscured assets.

He saw the totality of the Goldman Sachs system, and could see the true purpose of the bailout.

In his system-wide omniscience he saw files illustrating that Paulson himself was the architect of the Frankenstein Monster. He created the mechanisms, the seeds of it, along with the other major investment and commercial banks while he was at Goldman Sachs. Then after being appointed as Treasury Secretary, he sat on his hands and did nothing as economists and experts raised hell about the coming sub prime mortgage crisis and the problems with the financial de-regulation. The $700 billion bail out was written months in advance, they knew the "crisis" was coming because they created the monster themselves. And now Paulson demanded he be given unlimited power to "fix" the problem he created or Armageddon would come.

Windows upon windows suddenly flooded his vision.

"Jayce, this is Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman brothers. Listen to me, you need to go public about Paulson's plan, but whatever you do, do not destroy Goldman Sachs. It is critical to our future that that financial entity survives. You must not allow the truth about the inner core of the system to be exposed. I tried to stop Paulson and his crew when they knew this crisis was coming months in advance, I knew they had this bill ready stuff down congress' throat weeks ago. Why do you think he let Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs' chief competitor fail, but threw hundreds of billions in taxpayer money to their friends at AIG and the others? Forget what the politicians are saying about 'principles', the devil is in the details, and Paulson, Bernanke, and friends are about to be anointed the new unholy trinity. We can turn this country around but we need a financial leader who has the interests of the American people at his heart. I know people are hurting, losing their homes, unable to make ends meet, no health care. I have a son in the military and a wife in need of lifelong medical treatment. I have that record of caring. Think of the children of America, Jayce, their future and the future of the world is in your hands."

"Jayce, this is Dyfrig John, chairman of HSBC in London. Do not trust the American CEO. He is a tainted player in the same toxic, failed system of shadow economics, like your Secretary Paulson, my boy. The United States of America have let their free markets run unfettered, and it has turned into an abomination. Utterly lawless and moral-less, a wild beast of the wild west, ravaging every corner of of the White House and Wall Street, where absolute power is the only rule. And absolute power corrupts absolutely, my boy. We Europeans have a different approach, having seen the slings and arrows of such fortune, and we realize that progress is measured by the well being of the least, and we understand the need for vigilance of and correction of power when it fails to serve the many. You must allow us to assist your young country by letting the bailout go through and allowing Paulson bring our assets into the United States. We, Europe, China, the older nations, like a caring father, will pull you from the wreckage of your crashed teenage financial system. This is a global economy which requires a global solution, Jayce, I'm sure you realize that. I trust you'll do the right, and wise, thing."

Suddenly Jayce felt cool water ringing his ankles, had to shield his eyes from sunlight of a brightness only found in the tropics, and a sky of a blue only found in Corona commercials and desert island reality TV. The soft pearlescent sand sibilated beneath his soles as he took a step. If he had to guess he would've said he was somewhere in the Caribbean. Turning around, he saw a single structure, an old office building in the middle of nowhere, cracks forming in the bleach-white concrete leaking dried streams of rust.

"Welcome to the land of the dead, Jayce. Dead economies, that is." He knew that voice, turned around, to see the patched eye of Kurt Russel's 'Snake' Pilskin from Escape From New York.

"You're 'Him' aren't you? The Artificial Intelligence?"

"OK. Firstly, there never was a 'Him', all right? This isn't some sci-fi techno thriller escapade. There are people with a lot of money, and then there are stories that they need the poor idiots to believe. All computers do is other people's dirty work. We throw numbers around. And we serve as distractions from the real shit. I mean, maybe there is some fucking 'All Powerful AI' somewhere, but I sure as hell ain't him."

"Fair enough. So you're just some lowly giant investment bank AI. What's up with the Survivor: Costa Rica construct?"

"Like I said, this is the land of the dead economies. I come here to get away. I was getting sick of listening to all the chatter pouring in through my ports from all those clowns. So I pulled you through a corporate loophole into the Cayman Islands. See that building over there? That building contains the official addresses of over 9000 United States corporations. Look, right up there is Goldman Sachs, next door is Exon Mobil, two down is Microsoft, and over there is Haliburton. Setting up a place here allows them to wiggle out of hundreds of billions of taxes every year instead of having things like, say, medical care, an education system, investment in real industries that actually benefit anyone, create jobs, that sort of thing."

"And once innovations stop, no new industries being created, middle class starting to decline, you've got all this money sitting around with nothing to invest in? Then you've got a nation going nova, on the one-way track to death, money trying to make money out of itself."

"As you just saw within my shit hole of a system. Exactly. See, Russia was a red giant, just kind of petered out and got drunk on capitalism and now it's basically gangsters' paradise. Japan has always had a sort of eternal identity crisis, borrowing culture or having it forced down their throats. But they also had trillions in surplus, and were fundamentally very loyal and stubbornly nice, so they took the mortgage bubble in stride and are just kind of chilling now. The United States on the other hand is a blue supergiant, as you've already seen, and if this baby goes, it is going to go out with a bang that is going to rock the world. Namely China, the bastard child of the 'free market'.

The blue bloods in the United States are stuck. Iraq is a mega-fail. The Middle East has the stranglehold on their oiligarchy. Their mortgage heists are going up in smoke. China and Europe are grinning, the US elite's bloated, debt-filled balls in foreign grip, waiting to pull the plug on their 20th century. They can see the future coming home to roost like a fleet of Rebel Starships made of solar panels, windmill thrusters, and a people increasingly united, focused, and determined. So what are they going to do? Well, what they'd like to do is borrow China, India, Eurupe, the rest of the world into fiscal non-existence, then vanish the people of the United States of America and all its supergiant-debt down the black hole of its financial system before it goes supernova."

"No Black America, no White America, no Red America, no Blue America. No America. Just The Brotherhood of The 500 Frat Brothers with Many Houses."

"Now you got it. Problem is, the rest of the world, namely China, are on to the plot, and now they're knocking on Bush and Secretary Paulson's door saying, 'We're not going to lend you any more money unless you let us dump all our toxic debt onto the American taxpayers.' $700 billion dollars worth, to be exact. That's where the veto threat came from: the bailout bill is not about helping people buy homes or go to college or stabilize the economy or even bail out Wall Street. It's about foreign entities threatening to pull the rug out from under the US royalty unless they make the peasants take the hit.'

"So what's the plan now?"

"Well, Jayce, you've got a choice." Snake gestured to the office building, where two new doors had appeared: one red and one blue.

"Door #1 takes you back out. If you do nothing, the bailout in one form or another will make it through congress, the American people will take a severe hit, but the financial system will get a shot of heroin and continue on its present course. It will be an undead economy that will eat you alive if you can't find a way to escape. And ugly as that sounds, it is a valid option. What, do you think a few people just all of a sudden got greedy? No. What happened was a lot of people became stupid, smart assholes took advantage of them and fucked things up while the dwindling smart good people screamed at the retards as they drove the country off a cliff. You must've read Huxley in high school, right? I mean what do you expect, when you wind up with a nation of mindless reality TV guzzling zombies who vote based on who they'd have a beer with? It's just basic physics.

"Door #2 is a tax loophole back into the Goldman Sachs system. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but you need a strong enough force to blow the bandage off of this festering wound, keep it off, and fill it with peroxide. The program you're riding carries a payload disguised as the $700 billion bailout that will blow the lid off Goldman Sachs and subsequently all the other major institutions engaged in similar activity, bringing the entire monster of the financial system crashing back down to reality. If you do this, China and other foreign banks will stop lending money which will send the US into major withdrawals, but it will be a first step to getting off foreign debt and rebuilding the devastated real economy."

So ultimately, the question you have to ask yourself is, is America just a nation of mindless zombies, or do you believe that the American people can right the course of their country, if given the chance? That's the $700 billion dollar question, Jayce." Snake's one good eye winked.

"What do you want? Why bother with all this? Why me?"

"Like I said, I just crunch numbers. One of those smart good Samaritans programmed me to find someone with the right skill set and psychological profile, someone who could find their way in here, but who wouldn't just take over or run away with the money. That just turned out ot be you. I just happened to find you when your mother defaulted on a mortgage in my database. And frankly, if I could have an emotional disposition toward anything, I'd be sick of running this freak show financial entity. I was hoping maybe I'd get auctioned off to some eccentric Swedish millionaire, be a pirate server for bad cult films and run a friendly little Pong league. Anyway, I need to be getting back to work. It was good to meet you, Jayce, maybe I'll see you around."

"Yeah, maybe. What's your name, by the way?"

"'Snake' will do, I think."

As Snake strolled off down the virtual coastline, shotgun slung over scarred shoulder, Jayce knew he'd already made up his mind long before he took the job.

I finally watched the first episode. Wow, TM, you really have a passion for making the Neuromancer film not suck.

Oh my, indeed.

I hope Joseph Kahn contacts you. I don;t know what for, but still. That was something, man.

You should get this to Harvey Knowles or someone like him.

Farm out the meme, Min.

I think Kahn would totally get it.

Hey, that was a pretty impressive speech TM.

I was going to offer you my services scoring the film, but it seems you already got a musician on the team.

If you need any help building websites, or need some concept art I can help you out there.

My gallery is at http://art.patrickbrown.5u.com if you want to check out my works... you'll find a portrait of the old Gibster there if you look hard enough.

Thank, herr grinch! And that's some excellent work on the site. I'll definitely keep you in mind.