Now as most of you know, I don’t do any advertising on Cyberpunk Review, which means it’s a massive time sink that doesn’t generate a dime (this is exactly how I want it to be!). Collecting advertising revenue on a site devoted to cyberpunk concepts just seems wrong somehow. That said, I have absolutely NO qualms about accepting gifts! Cyberpunk movies, books, figures (the Borg Queen, if you have it), games - I’d be more than happy to accept (send an email to sfam”at”cyberpunkreview.com if feel the urge!). While I have gotten a number of movies sent for me to review, this is my first cyberpunk book:

Successful erotic fantasy author, M. Christian, sent me a wonderful message saying how much he liked Cyberpunk Review, and offered to send me his book of “smutty cyberpunk short stories,” called The Bachelor Machine. I just got it in the mail today, so I can’t give a review of it yet. But often when I find a new author I’m interested in, I like to take the book and open it to a random page and start reading. Here’s a sample for you from the first place I opened it to - page 132, halfway down:

She walked with purpose down Ringold. Black plastic raincoat, cheap leather boots, a threadbare purple Zo/courier bag - showing what her last straight job was - and coal mine shades. Invisible in the SOMA turf, she was average enough not to catch a second glance.

But I knew her - we’d fucked. But never in the flesh. Cybersea fucking: interactive chat and visuals. Breasts just the right size for filling hands, she said. An electric cunt tight enough to rip condoms off, she said. We’d fucked so many times, but I’d never seen her in the flesh, and I’d never asked her real name.

Trust.

Bytebitch saw me. Didn’t smile. The brown eyes behind the shades might have, but I had no way of knowing. On the corner with me was the picked-clean corpse of a Saab. She moved to the pitted fender and propped herself against it.

Cybersez: Get Comfy…

I think I’m gonna like The Bachelor Machine! Thanks, Chris! Better yet, M. Christian mentions he has another cyberpunk erotica book due to come out in a year from now. I’ll be looking forward to it. And if you want to learn more about him, M. Christian has this cool blog.

I’ve changed the navigation menu a bit. The major change is in the addition of the Cyberpunk Wiki. So far, we’ve only had updates to the Cyberpunk Websites page, but hopefully we can get lots more of you to start participating. If you have a band that plays cyberpunk-like music, list it. Same if you do cyberpunk art, make movies, etc.

The other changes involve adding a link to my “Movies by Star Ratings” page on the top - apparently many haven’t seen the movie category groupings on the right - hopefully this will help somewhat. Also, I’ve taken off the full name of the forums. Previously they were called the “Virtual Meatspace (forums)” but I’ve shortened this to just forums. We still refer to them as the Virtual Meatspace (Meatspace is NOT misspelled - this is a Neuromancer reference - either you get it or you don’t) but I don’t have enough room on top to list the full name anymore.

Finally, just an update on the site. Even with my lack of posts in December, CyberpunkReview has still been growing at a pretty steady rate, as has the Virtual Meatspace, which has become pretty active - better yet, it has a terrific international flavor to it, which I love. In January, Cyberpunkreview got over 33,000 unique visitors with almost 200,000 page views (not counting bots). I still have no advertising here, and don’t ever plan on doing so.

I’m also a big believer in the power of mass collaboration. If you have a desire to take part in doing reviews, or build out the Wiki however you see fit, climb on board! We’ll welcome you with open arms.

After many requests, I’ve finally gotten a wiki up.

• http://www.cyberpunkreview.com/wiki/

I’m using TikiWiki as my engine, and am using a template called “Tikipedia” that mimics Wikipedia. I don’t know that I have everything structured the way it should be, but hopefully it works well enough to kick the tires. If you’re a regular here and are good at administering TikiWikis, PLEASE stop by and comment on what I may or may not need to change in the numerous admin pages.

The hope is that the Cyberpunk Wiki will be used to list cyberpunk bands & artists, cyberpunk books, movies, graphic novels, and anything else you all want. It even has a nice place to upload articles, so have at it, and let me know what we need to change.

Those of you who frequent the Meatspace Forums will notice a change in the look of the forum. This wasn’t due to a problem I had with the old look, but was instead due to the need for me to upgrade the software to the latest version. In addition to massive spamming of the blog entries, I’ve been getting over a hundred spam accounts a week there. While the Wordpress plugin, “Akismet” captures most of the blog postings (my worst day had over 5,000 spam comments to my blog), the automated bot accounts are a true drag to clean out. I’ve just updated the software to the most current version in order to take advantage of some of the anti-spam features - we’ll see how things go.

If you are using the forums, the new “default” view is the “XBOX” theme, which I’ve spent the better part of the day modifying (I had intended to do a review for Code 46, but such is life - that will be coming tomorrow probably).

• You can change your view by going to your profile link (at the top of the page) and selecting the “Board style” pull-down menu.
• Please post in the sticky thread if you have suggestions for changes.
• Better yet, if you’re a graphics person and want to help customize some of the buttons and stuff, let me know!
• If you have any problems posting to the meatspace, please post here, and I’ll fix it.

Well I’m back now. Pumpkin carving pretty much takes up my life for a while - moreso this year as a local paper did a spread on my carvings. I ended up spending 9 hours sculpting the Death Star on a 120 pound pumpkin and another 11 1/2 hours creating a detailed, full scale dragon. In any event, although totally exhausted, I had a fun time with this. Check out my carvings if interested. Now, back to cool discussions and movie reviews!

Sorry for the intense lack of updates recently. Unfortunately, I’ve gone pumpkin carving. I do this every October, only this year I’ve gotten even more insane than ever. I have a 120 pound pumpkin to carve, a 70 pound pumpkin, and 15 other gourds. In addition to carving, I also end up making a bevy of new pumpkin patterns, including a massively complex full-scale dragon pattern for my 70 pound pumkin. I even got interviewed by the local paper last week so I’m expecting a big turnout. I’ve copied my previous carvings here if anyone is interested. This WILL be updated after Halloween.

Apparently my ISP was working on the SQL server and didn’t feel the need to let me know if it was offline. Anyone know how long cyberpunkreview was offline for earlier today?

Every now and then I like to update everyone on the site access and growth. I truly do appreciate especially the participation we’ve gotten here both with the comments (almost 1400 comments in total), and in the immense help so many have given in uncovering all these wonderful cyberpunk films (and even some of the “less than wonderful” ones). I absolutely love spending time building this site, and even though I don’t earn a dime off of it (generating ad revenue off of spreading the love for cyberpunk concepts seems wrong at some fundamental level), I really value CyberpunkReview more than I can express. Given this, and my relatively meager time I’ve been able to spend on CyberpunkReview for the first month since I’ve started, I’m shocked at the continued upswing in growth that July has shown. At the end of March, when I last did the stat thing, CyberpunkReview had almost over 8300 visits (267 per day), 37,000 page views (meaning the number of times a page on CyberpunkReview was requested) and just over 300,000 hits. Here’s what the stats looked like for January (search engine bot hits not included):

July 06 Statistics

• Total Visits: 19,877
• Average Visits Per Day: 641
• Total Page Views: 66,885
• Total Hits: 652,189

This is a doubling of the March statistics, but truly, July is a significant jump over June (almost 14,000 visits) as well. Overall, CyberpunkReview has had over 275,000 page views, and over 69,000 visits from almost 34,000 unique visitors (meaning about half the visits are from repeat visitors). In looking at the growth, I tried to figure out where this was coming from, and had hypothesized that there was a huge jump in search engine hits. Back in March, 49% of the site access came from a direct address (meaning someone typed or bookmarked “CyberpunkReview” to get here), 9% came from search engine hits, and 42% came from links from an external page (860 external links in all). In July, 51% of the site access came from a direct address/bookmark, 12% came from search engine hits and 37% came from external links (1184 in all). So really, to the extent things have changed, there has been a slight increase percentage wise in search engine hits, but the majority has come from direct links.

International Access

International access, while still growing wonderfully, has dropped as a total percentage of the hits. Previously, 40% of all hits used to be international; now this is somewhere around 33%. Interestingly, some of the increased US hits are graphic links - for instance, MANY sites in MySpace have linked to images here at CyberpunkReview. In any event, here are the top international country groupings accessing CyberpunkReview, along with the total page views from each:

1. European Union - 2521 page views
2. Australia - 2118
3. Germany - 1680
4. Great Britain - 1675
5. Canada - 1015
6. Sweden - 768
7. Spain - 651
8. Japan - 543
9. Netherlands - 526
10. Switzerland - 493
11. Belgium - 439
12. China - 384
13. Russian Federation - 350
14. Greece - 319
15. Denmark - 284
16. Poland - 284
17. Hong Kong - 277
18. Puerto Rico - 248
19. Yugoslavia - 223
20. Brazil - 221
21. Czech Republic - 203
22. Slovak Republic - 196
23. Portugal - 187
24. France - 162
25. Others (and unidentified) - 5621

Visitor Machine Profiles
Operating Systems: 89% of all visitors have MS Windows for their operating system. 6.5% use Macintosh, 2.2% use Linux, and less than 1% use FreeBSD, Sun Solaris, WebTV (25 hits for this one), and NetBSD.

Browsers: MS Internet Explorer won July with 46% of all hits, whereas Firefox came in second with 38% (common folks! Go Firefox!). Opera accounted for 7%, Safari for 4.4%, and Mozilla, Netscape, Konqueror, Camino, and NetNewsWire accounted for less than 1% each.

Top Accessed Pages
Not surprisingly, as a single page, the RSS news feed has pretty much dominated everything else. Over 15,000 page views came from the RSS feed in July. For actual posts or category groupings, the breakdown is as follows:

1. Cyberpunk Movies by Decade
2. Ultraviolet
3. Tetsuo (The Iron Man)
4. What is Cyberpunk?
5. Fragile Machine
6. Texhnolyze
7. Ghost in the Shell
8. Ghost in the Shell Stand Alone Complex
9. A Scanner Darkly
10. Serial Experiments: Lain
11. Awesome Cyberpunk Visuals
12. Total Recall
13. Aeon Flux
14. Blade Runner
15. Armitage III

The Meatspace
The Meatspace Forum is still growing wonderfully. We have 95 members now, and there have been a some terrific discussions. Please join up! We’d love to have you participate!

Spam!!!
Aside from getting 1-2 bogus accounts on the Meatspace every day (I delete these every few days), I’ve had over 260 spam comments uploaded to the site. While you would think this would be a nightmare to manage, the Akismet plugin has been a Godsend. I think that less than 10 spam comments have actually made to the site - all the rest were captured by Akismet, providing me easy deletion of them. For the spammers, I’ve gotten an insane number of ringtone comment ads, and a surprising number of japanese ads.

Still Looking for Reviewers
We’re still looking for more reviewers for Cyberpunk Review. Especially of interest are those interested in doing book, music and graphic novel reviews, but if someone wants to do cyberpunk art reviews, or cyberpunk internet short reviews, this would be great too. We have about 5 people on and off doing game reviews, but to date, we’ve only had one person (David Gentle) who’s done a book review for us. I’m eagerly looking forward to more from him, but clearly, cyberpunk books comprise the bulk of the content in the cyberpunk genre. If you have an interest, PLEASE PLEASE let me know. There’s a reviewers forum in the Meatspace that can give you some basic info on this.

And thanks again for stopping by. And especially, thanks to all of you who’ve been participating in the comments and the discussions in the meatspace.

Just a brief apology for the lack of updates recently. My computer hard drive crashed about 10 days ago, and I was on travel all last week. I’m getting close to being back to normal now. I’m planning on uploading a review for Alien 4 in the next day or so.

This Sunday, I will be at the Shore Leave con in Baltimore giving another rendition of my “Hidden Gems in Cyberpunk Film and Anime” presentation. This went over pretty well at Balticon - hopefully it will be well attended at Shore Leave as well. I’m be speaking opposite of two of the event’s main attractions - Amanda Tapping and Carmen Argenziano from Stargate SG-1. I’m not a Stargate SG-1 fan, so I don’t mind missing their talk to much (Battlestar Galactica’s Jamie Bamber comes on right after - I WILL be watching that). And at least this is better than Balticon, where I was speaking opposite of Gene Wolfe’s presentation on his Wizard-Knight series - I almost thought about skipping my speech to go see his instead.

You’ll also notice from the cyberpunkreview brocure that site access and participation continue to grow. We’ve had well over 200,000 page views in total, and so far for this month, we’re averaging over 500 visits a day (actual people, not bots for both totals). We’re still looking for more reviewers, so if interested, drop me a line (sfam”at”cyberpunkreview.com). Anyways, if you’re a SciFi fan living near Baltimore, stop on by (directions are in the Shore Leave link). I’ll be speaking at 1:00, this Sunday the 9th.