Recently I’ve been interested in the steampunk genre.  Steampunk is similar to the perhaps better known cyberpunk, but rather than taking the high-tech future as its setting, it creates a sort of high-tech past, a world where clockwork and steam are the driving forces of fantastic machines–think H.G. Wells and Jules Verne.  The genre gets used in movies and books and so forth, but I happened to stumble across several websites of people working with steampunk in a more concrete way.  These folks do modifications of various technological items to give them a steampunk feel.  I think they’re quite beautiful–the Victorian era had much better industrial design, at least to my eyes, than we do now.  I’d be interested in trying out making similar things, but I think I’d be in far over my head.  Anyway:

At Steampunk Workshop, Jake von Slatt does steampunk mods to a variety of things, including an RV and computer keyboards.  Datamancer (who happens to have done some web design on the Steampunk Workshop site) also makes keyboards, and takes the trope further, making a fully functional steampunk laptop among other things.  Over at Brass Goggles, Tinkergirl writes a handy blog about all things steampunk.

These links I’ve had around for a while, but the other day I happened to find a game called Balloon Invasion.  Defending yourself against  airships–what could be more steampunk?  A quick google will find lots of other related things, I’m sure.

So I’m beginning a blog. It won’t be anything particularly special, just your standard description of stuff I do, mostly online. The first few posts will probably be big lists of links I’ve had sitting open in windows while I contemplated making one of these things. Many thanks to Kit La Touche of SCCS for doing all the legwork of putting this together.