Steampunk!

Squid to come soon.

I'll let you suppose what this entails. Or doesn't.

I'm sure you all are aware the Tor.com theme for October has been/is the wonders of all that iswasmightbe Steampunk. Now, this concept has been around since the late 80s (in the 1800s it was simply science fiction). But I wasn't even aware of it until 2005. In 2005, I discovered the welcoming, open-hearted, zeppelin-strewn skies of this odd little subculture/genre. Handmade craft! Dapper couture! Bizarre music! If you missed out on Tor's awesome columns and guest bloggers, and well... the event of the season, and you're interested even vaguely in this clanky, smoky mess that is Steampunkery, I'd suggest the following sites:

BrassGoggles
The Steampunk Workshop
The Clockwork Cabaret (Rather neat radio show/podcast of SP music and hilarity)
Dieselpunks
Steampunk Magazine
Make: Technology on Your Time (Steampunk and Maker culture overlap heavily)

Personally, I got into Steampunk through an odd coincidence of interests back in '05. I started looking heavily into handmade/renewable stuff like Instructables.com and at the same time, rereading Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy, getting more disgusted with our cold sense of industrial design these days, and probably a slew of other catalysts I'm not remembering. The zeitgeist grabbed me hard and all these little aesthetic things that were floating around in my head coagulated like a chilled cup of pudding. Tasty, tasty aesthetic pudding.

I think I discovered BrassGoggles first, the Steampunk Workshop second, and it snowballed from there. I would guess I made my first Steampunk art in 2006 for work (greatest excuse). It was this custom dunny, given away as a prize in our local treasure hunt at Project A-kon 17 in Dallas, TX. I have since done t-shirts, art exhibits, vignettes from the Lively Adventures of Hogarth Merricule III, and of course... the 19th century outfit for my wedding last October.

In honor of the winding down of Tor's Steampunk Month, I would like to dedicate this entry to that end. In case this wasn't apparent enough already.

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Today's drastic timewaster: Twitter
Today's soundtrack: Regina Spektor & Luminescent Orchestrii
Today's projects: squid in the morning, digital graphics at night


*I keep capitalizing Steampunk because I've recently seen it used as a form of personal description, viz. "steampunk/s". So, to differentiate genre from practitioners.