Tag: Bladerunner

Detective Buddy And The Case Of The Vanishing Yums

In the seedy underbelly of Paw City, where niplords run kitty crack empires and feral gangs fight eternal turf wars, one unshakable detective brings the bad cats to justice.

The call came in after midnight.

Shots fired near Burmese Boulevard, with witnesses reporting one party fleeing the scene in a car while another took off on foot.

Normally I’d tend to other biz and let one of the kids in the detective bureau have their shot, but the commissioner’s on my ass and the mayor is worried about what the headlines will do to the tourism economy.

Leave it to the leaders of a dump like Paw City to care more about the scratch in their pockets than the felines they’re supposed to protect.

But I’m a grizzled detective. I know where the real power naps, and it ain’t city hall.

It’s Scratcher Tower, home of the international consortium that runs Big Yums, controlling the flow of every last morsel of kibble into this forsaken city. The Fat Cats on the top floor, they call the shots, control the mayor and have their paws in every pie. If it’s biz, the Fat Cats get their cut.

The feds? They talked a big game last year when they popped Angelo Felinzino and nailed him on a racketeering charge that earned him 15 to 20 in the slammer. But the Fat Cats are a hydra, and even though Felinzino was rumored to be the consortium’s top earner, the fellas in Scratcher Tower’s penthouse didn’t miss a beat.

It was pouring by the time I pulled up near the corner of Tortoiseshell Street and Burmese Boulevard. I padded out of the warm comfort of my ride, the Budmobile, and told it to watch my back. The Budmobile’s AI chimed in acknowledgement and miniature silos opened on each rear quarter panel, ejecting a pair of drones. One drone circled above me in a defensive posture while the other zoomed ahead, scouting my path.

I tasted wet rain and something else. My nose wrinkled, pulling me toward a funky scent. I crouched, sniffing the sidewalk, and that’s when I saw them: crumbs made soggy by the downpour, their addictive chemicals turning a shade of toxic lime as they interacted with the acid rain.

A Temphead had been here not long ago.

Tempheads are dangerous. They’ll do anything to get their fix, even if it means stealing from littermates or breaking into homes to raid the treat cupboards.

No Temphead was going to catch me off guard, I thought as I placed a paw on my holster and felt the reassuring grip of Thunderclaw. The old revolver was reliable and had legitimate stopping power. The sight of it alone was often enough to get bad guys to back down.

Lightning cracked the sky as I followed the crumbs down Burmese Boulevard, under the old wrought iron bridge and into a back alley.

I paused and sniffed. The Temphead had lingered here at the door to a shady-looking ripperdoc clinic, probably trying to get them to buzz him in. The ripperdoc was smart, didn’t want anyone bringing heat down on his clinic, so he turned the Temphead away.

My keen sense of smell and my detective’s intuition told me the Temphead quickly moved on, and sure enough, there were more crumbs ahead, where the alley made a sharp right turn toward a cross street.

I padded ahead, nose leading the way, and looked up.

The Bradbury Building.

Once a symbol of commerce in the city’s gilded age, now a dilapidated microcosm of Paw City, its former glory obscured beneath decades of grime and decay.

Patting Thunderclaw again for reassurance, I pushed against the heavy bronze doors and into the gloom inside.

My ears prickled in the funereal silence, and my whiskers felt movement in the air currents. There!

A shadowy figure was heading for one of the exits.

Justice is my job, and what kind of cat would I be if I didn’t have the swiftness of a cheetah and the bravery of a tiger?

I leaped the railing, landing gracefully on my feet as I always do, and followed the shadow through the door. The rain was coming down hard, battering my trenchcoat and cap.

Where’d that cat go?

He was clever, I’ll give him that. Lightning lit the alley, and he used the crackle of thunder to mask the sound of his feet splashing through the puddles before he leaped.

I never even saw it coming. It’s been a long time since anyone’s gotten the jump on me. Maybe I was too confident. The attacker barreled into me, knocking me off my feet, and was already propelling himself up a nearby fire escape as I landed in a puddle of rain water.

Thunderclaw was torn from my grip with the impact and went skidding across the concrete.

The Budmobile’s follow drone chose that moment to reappear, making a lazy loop around the alley before stopping to hover in front of me, its ventral nozzles firing whispers of propellant to keep it stabilized.

“Oh dear,” the drone said, “you seem to have fallen, sir. Shall I bring the car around?”

“This,” I told myself, “is undignified.”

The drone chimed.

“Is that a yes, sir?”

I resisted the urge to paw smack the useless machine.

“Yes! Call the Budmobile to the end of the alley.”

I might have been Paw City’s greatest detective, but I wasn’t going to catch criminals with my clothes and fur all wet, smelling like a dirty mutt.

I retrieved Thunderclaw from the ground, slipping the trusty revolver back into its holster.

That’s when I saw it — a scrap of torn clothing on the end of the fire escape, black as night. Black like the absence of light.

I ran a paw pad over the material, feeling its familiar weave and texture. There was only one shop in this section of Paw City that sold zero albedo clothing. Could the Shadow Void be back to stalk the seedy underbelly of Paw City once again? I put him in the slammer once. Now I may have to do it again.

I climbed back into the Budmobile, grateful for the blast of heat from its dash. It was time to pay Tommy the Tailor a visit…

Check back for the next episode of Detective Buddy: Feline Noir!

Wordless Wednesday: Nibbles The Cat From Cyberpunk 2077

Nibbles is the feline star of Cyberpunk 2077, a little buddy who adds a little levity and fun to the game’s dystopian future.

For PITB’s inaugural Wordless Wednesday, which is turning out to be a somewhat Wordy Wednesday, we’re celebrating Nibbles, the pet cat of protagonist V in Cyberpunk 2077.

Cyberpunk is an open world video game set in Night City, a sprawling dystopian city-state. If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live in the perpetual gloom of Blade Runner’s rainy, neon-soaked future, Cyberpunk 2077 is as close as you’re going to get.

Notably, you don’t start the game with Nibbles, who is initially a stray living in the filthy hallways of your apartment building and subsisting on garbage. You’ve got to find him, feed him real food and convince him you’ll be a worthy servant, because even trash-eating strays have standards.

A gamer shows off her pet cat, who bears a striking resemblance to Nibbles. Credit: Elissa Ayadi/Instagram

After you rescue Nibbles, he makes himself at home in your apartment, faithfully greets you when you return, protests when you use the shower, and meows impatiently for yums. He also enjoys lounging in your laundry basket.

You can pose with Nibbles anywhere in Night City for screenshots.

Nibbles is quite demanding, like all members of his species.

Another gamer with a sphinx cat doing her best Nibbles impression.

Johnny Silverhand, played by Keanu Reeves, also takes a liking to Nibbles. Meanwhile, Nibbles takes a liking to the laundry basket.

Nibbles lounging.

Finally, some screenshots I took of Nibbles, V, Johnny Silverhand (Keanu Reeves) and Reed (Idris Elba):

Nibbles with V and Idris Elba.

Nibbles: “Feed me, lady.”

Nibbles is the star of the show

‘Why I Took 50,000 Pictures Of My Cats Pooping’

One software engineer went to incredible lengths to monitor her cat’s bathroom habits.

When Alan Turing, the father of artificial intelligence, posed the heady question “Can machines think?”, he inspired generations of computer scientists, philosophers, physicists and regular people to imagine the emergence of silicon-based consciousness, with humanity taking the godlike step of creating a new form of life.

And when science fiction writer Philip K. Dick wrote his seminal 1968 novel, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” — the story that would eventually become Ridley Scott’s 1982 classic Bladerunner — he wondered what makes us human, and whether an artificial being could possess a soul.

It’s safe to say neither of those techno-prophets were thinking of fledgling AI algorithms, representing the first small steps toward true machine-substrate intelligence, announcing themselves and their usefulness to the world by helping us watch felis catus take a shit.

And yet that’s what the inventors of the LuluPet litter box designed an AI to do, and it’s what software engineer and Youtuber Estefannie did for her cat, Teddy, who’s got a bit of a plastic-eating problem.

“The veterinarian couldn’t tell me how much plastic he ate, and it would cost me over $3,000 [to find out]. So I didn’t do it,” Estefannie explains in a new video. “Instead, the vet gave me the option of watching him go to the bathroom. If he poops and there’s no plastic in his intestines, then he won’t die, and he might actually love me back.”

Estefannie casually described how she wrote a python script, set up a camera and motion sensor, and rigged it to take photos of Teddy doing his business. But, she explained, there was “a tiny problem”: Luna the Cat, aka her cat’s cat.

“This is Luna, this is technically not my cat, this is Teddy-Bear’s cat, and she uses the same litter box as Teddy,” she explained.

For that, she’d need more than a script. She’d have to build a machine learning algorithm to gorge itself on data, cataloguing tens of thousands of photos of Teddy and Luna along with sensory information from the litter box itself, to learn to reliably determine which cat was using the loo.

So Estefannie decided it was a good opportunity to “completely remodel” Teddy’s “bathroom,” including a compartment that would hide the bespoke system monitoring his bowel movements. The system includes sensors, cameras and lights to capture still images of Teddy dropping deuces in infrared, and a live thermal imaging feed of the little guy doing his business. (Teddy’s luxurious new bedroom turned out to be too dark for conventional cameras, thus the pivot to infrared.)

From there, Estefannie manually calculated how long Teddy’s number ones and twos took, and cross-referenced that information with photo timestamps to help determine the exact nature of Teddy’s calls of nature.

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The future! (Note: This is our cheesy photoshopped interpretation, not Estefannie’s actual stool monitoring interface.)

When all the data is collected, Estefannie’s custom scripts sends it to an external server, which analyzes the images from each of Teddy’s bathroom visits and renders a verdict on what he’s doing in there.

Finally, Estefannie gets an alert on her smartphone when one of the cats steps into the litterbox, allowing her the option of watching a live feed and, uh, logging all the particulars. The software determines if a number two was successful, and keeps detailed records so Teddy’s human servant can see aberrations over time.

“So now I definitely know when Teddy-Bear is not pooping and needs to go to the hospital,” she said.

I am not making this up.

For her part, Estefannie says she’s not worried about a technological singularity scenario in which angry or insulted machines, newly conscious, exact revenge on humans who made them do unsavory tasks.

“Did I make an AI whose only purpose in life is to watch my cats poop?” Estefannie asked, barely keeping a straight face. “Mmmhmm. Will it come after me when the machines rise? No! Ewww!”

Cats In Games: Cyberpunk 2077

In Cyberpunk’s future, all animals are gone…except roaches and pet cats.

I’ve been playing Cyberpunk 2077 lately, as readers of this blog may have guessed by some of the references, and it is everything the hype said it would be: A dystopian story set in a grim, hyper-corporatized, ultra-capitalist future in which the masses worship the gods of consumption, virtually everything that humans come in contact with is synthetic, and nature is a forgotten dream that may or may not exist beyond the seemingly-infinite concrete and chrome of human sprawl.

It’s Bladerunner writ large and interactive, a retrofuturistic nightmare in which people voluntarily have their own eyes plucked out to replace them with brain-interfaced digital lenses and biomechanical grotesqueness is the societal norm. A future in which a person’s life amounts to the price their internal organs can fetch on the black market and the only civil liberties that exist do so by the forbearance of megacorporations.

Even if you’re not a gamer, unless you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably heard of the game. It is, after all, one of the most highly-anticipated pieces of consumable media in modern history, and familiar actors have lent their voices and likenesses to the production.

One of the most depressing aspects of 2017’s Bladerunner 2049, the long-awaited sequel to the 1982 Ridley Scott classic, is the utter disconnect from anything natural.

Future Los Angeles is so choked with smog that the city exists in a perpetual twilight gloom. Animals have been purged from the Earth, and humanity has turned to farming insect larvae for protein in processed foods. Vegetation is so rare that the sight of a single sprout near the dusty carcass of an old oak tree fascinates Ryan Gosling’s antagonist character, K.

Drawing heavily on Bladerunner — as well as the seminal 1988 Japanese film Akira, William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), and even the 1979 action thriller Warriors (which is itself based on Xenophon’s Anabasis from 370 BC) — Cyberpunk 2077 is about violence, hedonism and human greed.

There is no room for the beauty of animals or nature in a future like this.

That’s why it’s surprising to find cats stalking the dim alleys of Cyberpunk 2077’s Night City.

Keanu and the cat.
Keanu Reeves’ character, Johnny Silverhand, is quite enamored with Nibbles the Cat.

Nibbles the Cat.
A Sphinx cat in Cyberpunk 2077.

The player’s character, V, can stop and pet stray cats he encounters throughout the game.

There’s even a hidden opportunity to adopt your own stray and take it back to your apartment in the game. Johnny Silverhand, the wise-ass character played by Keanu Reeves, is particularly fond of Nibbles the stray, who can be found amid piles of trash in the hallway outside V’s apartment.

Nibbles “doesn’t really do much besides lay around and take up space,” Screenrant notes. “Basically exactly what a cat does in real life. What an immersive experience.”

In another scene, V is conducting recon on a corporate target with Takemura, a Japanese ally, when a cat slinks by and lays down about 20 feet away.

Takemura says the cat is the first animal he’s seen in Night City, “except for the cockroaches, of course.” Then he wonders if the cat is a bakeneko, a Japanese spirit.

Night City is a technological achievement so impressive that it takes many hours just to get your head wrapped around how big and detailed it is. It’s easily the largest virtual city ever created, but it’s not just about sprawl — the city is truly vertical, from hidden subterranean depths and accessible street-level locales to highways, apartments and offices that claw at the sky, their peaks towering over ubiquitous flying car traffic.

The game is a form of entertainment, but it’s also a warning: This could be our future. Some would say it’s even likely to be our future.

Most of us are disconnected from nature. We’ve forgotten the stars and the night sky, which have been blotted out by smog and light pollution. We have wiped out more than two thirds of all the wildlife on the Earth and innumerable species teeter on the edge of extinction, including almost every example of iconic megafauna, from tigers and jaguars to orangutans, chimpanzees and elephants.

The interregnum caused by the global pandemic has reminded us that we share this planet with billions of other minds, with animals cautiously poking their heads out at the edges of civilization, wondering where all the humans have gone.

It’s fun to play in a dystopian future, but I don’t want to live in it.

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