Giant Robotic Spiders take Japan...

...and the thing so many mech-heads have dreamed of finally comes true.

Here are two, steampunk giants that I would travel around the world to see. Until I can travel guilt free, I'll have to settle for life-sized robotic dinosaurs.



This is a lazy post, on a lazy night, after, let's face it, a lazy year of posting.
But I have to get back on the horse sometime.

found via botjunkie

ART NOUVEAU STEAMPUNK - The way the revolution should have been

This fantastic short animation by Adrien "CaYuS" Toupet, Clément Delatre & Looky is a perfect gem of revolutionary naivete, dystopianism and art noveau design.

The story of a revolutionary poster artist who designs Alphonse Mucha inspired agitprop, this five minutes is better than any full length steampunk film.

And it uses a design premise which it too often associated with the non-industrial - Art Nouveau.

Art Nouveau was inspired by what the machine would allow society to produce. Born beside mass production, this art form shunned the idea of a single craftsman for the utopian dream of human ingenuity paired with technology and new materials. Art Nouveau wasn't an art movement that coddled the artist and kept them in the past, but a basis of thought that questioned what was possible and strove the designer to innovate.

Sure, the character Cheri draws the product by hand, but by hooking her mind up to the steam-powered fabricator, she is using high technology and bypassing the one-off construction. She uses the tools of oppression to creat her art, and later die for it.

Before I sound too bolshi, the steam guns of the armoured police rock. And the thought of industrial wastelands lurking in the heart of Hausmann-like city blocks has a strong Mieville-like feel.

This film feels revolutionary.
It feels real.
And it leaves me wanting more of this story.

La Main des Maîtres
by -CaYuS-

La Main des Maîtres

Interview with La Main des Maitres Team

A Difference Engine in Every Home!

The Victoria singularity will be coming in any decade now! The Difference Engine No. 2 i son it's way to a Pacific Californian city near you. Now, when will the home prefabs be able to make me one of these? Or am I going to learn how to build one with smart drugs, lesson uploads, temporally osmotic yeoman service, and/or opening a book?

Check out IO9 for the specifics.

Stilt Walkers

I remember tracking this animation down one cold, sleety night in Halifax. Made living in an over-priced rotting residence room a little better.

Flying Frogs

Two pictures of frog-piloted devices.



Fleets of frogs, traversing the slipstreams, trading high-altitude sunglasses, DIY single-person airships and delivering collector air-mail stamps from High Amphibia.

found on Mi-Mi Moscow via We Make Money Not Art

Dreaming of Nemo on a slow Saturday afternoon

A portrait of the Nautilus fleet by sparth
Project Gutenberg: Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea

Airships will always have a home on this blog

Repairing the hull of the Graf Zeppelin in flight, 1933

I was perusing the 10 or so steampunk blogs I regularly view, when on the polish Steampunk Republika (a site in Polish that I navigate through pictures) I found a link to Rosebud's Early Airships and Aeroplanes site.

I quickly became locked out from sensations external to my desire to look at turn of the century aerodynes and rigid hull airships.

I know, I know, you think that airships have lost the race with aeroplanes and that there is no future for them.

Well, if you think that, you are wrong. And I will fight you over it. Not only are airships a superior form of travel but they are extremely more fuel efficient.

How is the airship better?

1. Airships are hard to bring down - yes, yes the Hindenburg blew up, but that was more of a design flaw than an inherent unreliability of the craft. For example, the Graf Zeppelin flew over a million miles and carried more than 34 000 passengers without incident.

2. On a large airship there is space to walk around. Sure the Graf Zeppelin only carried fifty passenger and crew, but the benefit of airships is that they can be scaled. You could literally have a skymall to walk around in as you took a nice two day journey across the Pacific. Too long for you? Would you rather sit in a seat, wedged in among row upon row of tired, aggravated passengers?

3. Fuel Efficiency - for the amount of fuel to send a jet across the Pacific, you could go around the world several times in an airship designed to carry the same amount of freight and passengers.

4. Because airships are cool.

Back to the site - the early aviator site has pictures of airships from before the halcyon day s of the Graf Zeppelin. These early aviators were braving the sky in new lighter than air vessels in pursuit of progress. Let's not forget that.

More airships to come.

Steampunk Slide-shows from Wired

My favorite genre - STEAMPUNK.

Something about the idea of steam-driven velocipedes, fine dinner jackets, clock-work minds and goggles... I get giddy thinking about it.

And let us not forget the mighty airship.


Now, off you go to view two cog-driven fantasies, courtesy of Wired magazine:

Steam Driven Dreams
Finding Nemo