ARCHIVED: Fun Stuff

[Blue Monkey]

I downloaded the files and my adobe cant read it.

I have to go back & see what I did. If I haven't posted here with an answer by Sunday night send me a pm.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Well, it's not exactly fun, but I don't know where else to put it. Perhaps the rl Carrington Event could provide a suitable part of a steampunk back story - something like what was done with the Wold Newton event. Be sure to follow the further links to the Space.com & SciAm articles for more usable details.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Of course it's in today's Wikipedia "did you know", - but, as usual, it's true...

"... that in 1825, the Court of Exchequer declared all contracts by hobbits illegal and void in England?"

 

[Balthasar]

And world financial markets have been unstable ever since. Let that be a lesson.

 

[Butterball]

Whats a steampunk?

 

[Balthasar]

I'll take a crack at that: the term "punk" was coined to describe a dark, anarchistic style that developed in the 1970's around a music style by the same name. As an art form, it included such stylistic elements as exposed wires and pipes, and makeshift environments. In the 80's, the term "Cyber-punk" was coined to describe that style as applied to sci-fi and techno ("The Matrix" for instance). An awful lot of anime is in cyberpunk style. Sometime in the late 90's someone imagined what it would look like if cyberpunk had developed in the Victorian era of the 1800's and "steam-punk" was born. The movies "Steamboy" (an anime feature) and "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" and even "Wild Wild West" pushed the genre in different directions, but it has sorta settled into a techno-victorian groove which we hope to use to full advantage here. In particular, we've taken the idea used in LOEG of using the sci-fi and speculative fiction of the 1800's as a way to introduce impossible ("punked") technology to the victorians, including lasers, computers, and giant steam-driven mechanical spiders. It's alot of fun, once you get into it, and the mod will hopefully be a real romp when we get it done...right now, we're about halfway there....

 

[Blue Monkey]

 

[jlvfr]

*snip awessome/scary/mystery picture*

Ok... I've got to know what this is!

 

[Blue Monkey]

Ok... I've got to know what this is!

steampunkwallpapers.com

 

[Blue Monkey]

I stumbled across Fenian Fire: The British Government Plot to Assassinate Queen Victoria. Anyone read it?

 

[Blue Monkey]

Doctor Grymm's Eye-Pod Victrola

 

[Blue Monkey]

Rather than let "this is not my beautiful house, this is not my beautiful wife, ..." become a mantra, I decided to visit The Gatehouse. Where I saw a blog post about a movie in production called War of the Worlds: Goliath.

Fan page at Heavy Metal
Concept Art Page

 

[KingArthur]

Not sure whether this is of use to anyone outside the UK but BBC Radio 4's Book at Bedtime is a reading of The First Men in the Moon by HG Wells. On all this week and available on iPlayer the day after.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lnmxy

 

[Blue Monkey]

Thanks, KingArthur. Librivox is another good source for many public domain downloadable books. I'm currently listening to Edison's Conquest of Mars.

 

[KingArthur]

Librivox - The quality of the narrators can be a bit hit and miss as can the quality of the recordings. Apart from that it's a great concept.

 

[Blue Monkey]

You're right about the narrators. OTOH, it's a source for stories - like ECoMC or Strange Manuscript Found In A Copper Cylinder - that are too rare or too expensive to get other ways, but useful for designing our scenarios. For example, the space craft described in ECoM are worth a unit. Picture a brass railway passenger car with what look like small wings but are really part of the control system for manipulating telluric energies that Tesla described, in order to selectively counteract gravitic effects. Most of the weapons & other technology described are attributed to Edison but really based on Tesla's work.

 

[Wyrmshadow]

Seen this yet?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds0-2irdP4c

 

[Plotinus]

That looks a lot of fun.

 

[Blue Monkey]

Thanks for the link. Yes, a lot of fun! Enough so that i wanted to see if there were images with good views of potential units or improvements. Their website has some stills with better resolution. And the trailer seems to stream better at the website of one of the techs involved than at youtube.

 

[Blue Monkey]

While waiting for a response from Wyrmshadow I took a screenshot of my current desktop. It's a reproduction of Athanasius Kircher's Magnetic Oracle at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. 200 years too early for steampunk, but then he was ahead of his time.