9 posts tagged “film”
Many thanks to everyone who voted in last week's survey about the future of the Steampunk Librarian. The overwhelming majority told me to keep everything as is, and so it shall be!
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I took this last summer and was a Gadgeteer. Apparently my tastes have changed a bit.
Your result for The Steampunk Style Test...
The Ragamuffin
18% Elegant, 55% Technological, 13% Historical, 48% Adventurous and 60% Playful!
You are the Ragamuffin, the embodiment of steampunk playfulness. Chances are, you approach the genre from a much more casual and lighthearted standpoint than most other fans. To you, there is always an element of play inherent in the genre, and you may very well enjoy fashion as much for the opportunity to dress up as for the style itself. You probably wear goggles as an accessory, and rarely as actual eye-protection. Your outfits are likely to incorporate a lot of brown or cream, and combine large boots, Victorian corsets or vests, aviator caps or bowler hats, and gypsy skirts or slacks, simply because you like them all.
Anyway! Steampunk Month continues over at Tor.com, with all sorts of neat posts and book excerpts. As for books, has anyone read Kage Baker's stories? They look intriguing.
Also intriguing: the web production titled Riese: The Series. The costuming alone looks awesome!
Steampunky websites with fabulous names: Strange Undisciplined Dreams of Great Things and the Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000.
The artist known as Tin does quite beautiful art with robotic overtones.
And finally, a poster that could serve as the Steampunk Manifesto!
I was sort of hoping that we would uncover an intricate design in the center of the room, which would be a mysterious coded message to a secret treasure in a faraway land...but, um, there wasn't anything. Still, we are pretty excited about the corners.
Other recent discoveries include the collection of Richard Balzer, who has a treasure trove of objects made before movie cameras, such as thaumatropes, myrioramas, and other optical toys, with flash galleries and tons of information.
Disney is planning a movie titled John Carter of Mars, and the casting has begun. I'm not sure how I feel about this yet. Tentatively optimistic, perhaps?
Steampunk must now be truly mainstream, as it's an actual party theme this season. (Some good ideas in there, regardless!)
More examples of the steampunk mindset infiltrating regular life: The Clockwork Man is one of those "hidden object" games that may or may not be a guilty pleasure when whiling away winter evenings. If you prefer your games to be a bit more action-packed, keep your eyes peeled for The Guns of Icarus -- it was originally scheduled to debut online yesterday, but has been pushed back a bit.
Speaking of guns...dieselpunk, a sibling of steampunk, is growing in popularity and web presence, hooray! It's darker and grittier and more mechanized in general; think 1930s rather than 1890s. The dieselpunks.org website just keeps getting better and better.
Punks and geeks of all sorts may be interested in an iPhone app called The Universe Splitter, which does just what it says. Sort of. (I am not well versed in the world of apps, as my cell phone looks like it's from 1989 and behaves accordingly, but this looks like fun.)
A gift for those people who have everything: Rocketship Tours will take them to the edge of space and back again. Alternatively, they could stay on land and enjoy their furniture made from actual aircraft.
Meanwhile, for the rest of us entrenched in reality, there are free films to watch online! Check out Der Luftkrieg der Zukunft (The Airship Destroyer), a silent German film from 1909 with dirigibles and more! (The entire Europa site is amazing and worth several hours of study.)
Steampunk and taxidermy have a weird symbiotic relationship that I don't truly understand. Something about gears and bones and transhumanism, I suppose. At any rate, this computer mouse by Daniel Pon combines both worlds in one click!
