Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Okay, things are slowly getting back to normal around here. You can click over to the Flickr account for photos of sideways trees if you like! In a marginally related vein, Umbrella Today is a nifty little 2.0 idea -- it tells you if you need to take an umbrella when you go out each day. (Swiped from Geistweg.)

On to steampunk. Gizmodo has declared it dead, but Bruce Sterling's "User's Guide to Steampunk" nails what attracts people to this sort of thing: "Steampunk is popular now because people are unconsciously realizing that the way that we live has already died. We are sleepwalking. We are ruled by rapacious, dogmatic, heavily-armed fossil-moguls who rob us and force us to live like corpses. Steampunk is a pretty way of coping with this truth." (Kudos to Jake von Slatt for finding this!)

I was busy being away, visiting babies and watching trees fall while La Princesse performed in Liverpool, but fortunately there's video footage.

Also, Brass Goggles seems to have broken while I was gone -- fortunately some refugees have set up Spare Goggles for the interim!

Recent discoveries: Jeremy Mayer creates amazing creatures from discarded typewriters, while Eric Orchard creates beautiful illustrations and stories on his weblog. Go and explore!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ok, I want to have Bruce Sterling's love child!

But, we would never have love children, because we are too smart to bring children into this godforsaken world.

I HEART Bruce Sterling. He gets it.

Anonymous said...

Good article/essay by Sterling. His thoughts on the steampunk movement being a pre-funeral for technology can be likened to the early gothic/punk movement being a metaphor for the death of traditional western values. First the values and traditions die...then the technology....wonder what sub-cultural phenomenon the disenfranchised financial sector will create for its pre-mortem?

:P